Intro



Let’s begin with a little story:

I swung by a coffee shop the other day, and I struck up a conversation with the barista. She seemed about my age, in her early thirties. She mentioned that she had to walk home with her son every day because she was worried about his safety.

“What are you so worried about, exactly?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Well, there’s a man that always follows my son home. He has a little notepad, and he walks very close–close enough to hear us talking, and he only leaves after we get inside our house.”

“That’s really…weird,” I said, settling into the stood in front of the bar. I realized my wallet was in my back pocket so I took it out and put it on the bar in front of me where I could see it. “Why don’t you call the police?”

She rolled her eyes. “They don’t seem to care. He hasn’t done anything illegal, they say.”

“That’s not okay,” I seethed. I didn’t know her, but I imagined it to be a very frightening situation and I was concerned for her. Why wouldn’t the police do anything? “What’s he writing? Why is he doing this? Can’t you demand that he goes away?”



“I don’t know,” she replied. “But the other day I saw him show the notepad to another person who then gave him some cash.”

“So he’s selling your information, at the very least. That’s an invasion of privacy. It’s got to be illegal!”

Our conversation was interrupted as another customer ordered a drink. While waiting for his coffee, the customer saw my wallet sitting in front of me. He reached out, casually flipped it open, and spread my credit cards and driver’s license over the table as he looked through them.

I watched him very carefully, but he didn’t take anything as he put the contents back into my wallet.

“What was that?” the barista said as soon as the man left. “Do you know him?”

“Nope. Never seen him in my life,” I answered.



It’s strange, yet a very real story. We would never be okay with these actions in real life, and yet when we’re online, we allow it every day.



This story is obviously fictional and it is inspired by conversations with the Growth Marketing team lead, Rosh. You may have seen his recent analytics and letters here and here.

We’ll be talking more about the Growth Marketing Team in this week’s update, but for now just remember: Great product teams are made of ordinary people.

Summary



A major proposal has been released to discuss the Delegated Proof of Stake(DPoS) system. This is a very important discussion that impacts everyone, so please read and weigh in with your thoughts: Elastos DPoS Proposal.



Feedback is still being sought out on the proposed constitution for the CR (https://www.cyberrepublic.org/council).



Shout-out for this epic Cyber Republic GIF by Martin Knight: https://twitter.com/mkmindsqueeze/status/1064296544634118144



When you share something cool for the Cyber Republic, make sure to tag it so that we can find your contribution.

#CyberRepublic #WeBuildItTogether #WeAreTheCyberRepublic



Virtual Meetup

Past Meetup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u1mJWcdtFs

Upcoming Meetup: TBD

Projects Update

Cyber Republic Website

Description

Main Project Repo: https://github.com/elastos/Elastos.Community/tree/master/ElastosBountyProgram

Git Activity and Updates

Extend Search (Task/Project/Team) with sorting and new filters.

Improve Team Search flow, with a team detail page of its own url (shareable).

User feedback: Made Community action links more prominent and removed all breadcrumbs.

Admin mode: Integrated Admin features into My Republic and removed the separate Admin mode.

My Republic: Added full text search and pagination to Tasks, Projects and Teams.

Fix: Only CRcle members can propose CRcle tasks.

Various bug fixes.

Elastos on React Native

Description

Git Activity and Updates

New demo video that showcases a simple react native app interacting with Elastos wallet functionalities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTUN2nf-M-o

New demo video that showcases a simple react native chat app interacting with Elastos carrier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCDUt4vF8Ek

Thank you, KP, for all your hard work going through the codebase and github to sharing information with the international communities. We know you love it, but we appreciate your dedication all the same.

Upcoming Meetups

Meetups are the bread and butter of the ecosystem’s growth. Be sure to attend if you’re in any of these areas:

UPCOMING MEETUPS Event Date Elastos Auckland (NZ) Meetup Friday, November 23, 2018 Elastos University of Illinois (USA) Meetup Friday, November 30, 2018 Elastos Melbourne (AUS) Meetup Tuesday, December 11, 2018 Elastos Brisbane (AUS) Meetup Thursday, December 13, 2018

Tasks

These are tasks still in progress. If you and/or your team can tackle any of these, make sure to apply quickly and earn some ELA!

Teams

As mentioned, we had a great discussion with Rosh about the CR Growth Marketing team. The team is stepping into a more official role in the Elastos ecosystem because of its dedication and vision. Rosh’s perspective has been inspiring, to say the least. His background in growth marketing and product management along with fellow lead, Kaia, is significant.

The CR is an online civic society. It is a place where people can find jobs, do business, build apps, and communicate all on the smart and secure web. This means that every step of the way must inherently be easy. Rosh’s team is tackling this monumental task.

Presenting the Cyber Republic in as simple a way as possible, having clear and directed avenues for community involvement, is groundwork that must be prioritized.



In the short term, they are working on creating channels of action for community members only casually involved in the past. They want to give guidelines on what members can and cannot do and improve coordination and marketing spread on all levels with objective analytics to increase transparency.



In the long term, Rosh dreams of a time when sharing Elastos and the Cyber Republic can work itself into casual conversions with parents, significant others, random strangers–all without intimidation. All newcomers, regardless of background, should understand what the CR is without effort and have access to tools to involve themselves as deeply as they desire.



The Growth Marketing team is always looking for more developers to join them, but in particular UX, project managers, and “people who can keep the trains running” can email Rosh at growth@cyberrepublic.org.

Other teams seeking additional members are:

TOP TEAMS ON THE CYBER REPUBLIC THIS WEEK Team Name Description “DMA Elastos Website” by Diego Dielru We are looking for a group of dedicated community members to get the DMA Elastos website up and running. DMA Elastos is a Decentralized Marketing framework that is currently being built on top of Elastos. It will allow DApps developers to build decentralized commerce applications. DMA is looking to be a major bridge in bringing mass adoption onto Elastos. For this task, all skills are welcome as so much of the work has yet to be done. If you would like to get involved in the early days of one of the most promising projects of Elastos, please connect ! “Overly Ambitious Technologies” by Amos Thomas We are a Caribbean based organization that currently provides IT services internationally. We would like to utilize Elastos to implement Caribbean wide ticketing system as parties and events are the lifeline of our economies. “Snowkelo” by Jose Mari Delfin Snowkel App is a Micro – Blogging Platform made for Bloggers, and Vloggers alike. With this implemented, It was built for Social Enthusiasm, like a Social Engine in a flick, The Snowkel App is different, It will be a mainstream built on PHP, and running as a Mediator to those who are into Micro Blogging and / or Blogging purposes only. With the Mediator in place, They can freely Blog, do a Write Up on their Latest Articles and even criticize anyone on Public Basis, Just as if you are Blogging about Mocha Uson and / or other Politically Minded People out there. “Software Testing / Test Management” by Bratwurst Doktor This group is focused on spreading knowledge about software testing and test management to increase quality of products / projects within the Elastos ecosystem. You need test cases, a test manager or tester for non-developer tests? You want to improve your knowledge about software testing? Welcome to this group “Evolve Elastos” by Justin Hescock EVOLVE ELASTOS will seek to expand the Elastos network through spreading knowledge and awareness to the community. We are seeking those who specialize in digital marketing and or writing. Don’t just watch the revolution happen, be part of it!

Join them and get involved, or create your own, here: https://www.cyberrepublic.org/developer/search?lookingFor=TEAM



Community

Some of this week’s community contributions. There are a lot of fantastic ones this week, so we highly encourage that you take the time to look through them!

Interview with a Cyber Republic Community Member

1) You’ve done a number of interviews now, so you must be tired of answering this, but could you introduce yourself again? What is your background and what you do for living?

Sure! My name is Jimmy Lipham, and I’m a software/electronics/gadget junkie. I’ve been programming ever since I was about ten years old, thanks to my parents who were very supportive of the whole computer thing at a young age. Over the years, I’ve worked in a variety of product industries through consulting agreements, ranging from embedded operating systems development to peer-to-peer based network solutions. Today, I work as a Chief Enterprise Architect mostly designing large scale software systems for companies in Austin, Texas.

2) We’re particularly interested in your significant background with P2P and decentralized technologies. Could you discuss those in a little more detail, and tell us how the Cyber Republic and Elastos relates to the core beliefs that you have?

I started programming when Napster was at the height of its popularity. Obviously we were devastated after it shut down, and then you saw things like Gnutella take off. Gnutella was an open source initiative that powered file sharing clients like LimeWire. I contributed a fair amount to the GnucDNA project, which was a software kit that allowed you to build in peer-to-peer functionality into any app of your choosing, very similar to Elastos Carrier. From there, I contributed to various projects like Chord and Kademlia, which power the decentralized data store that BitTorrent uses to this day.

I was attracted to these projects not because of what you could get with them, but with how the technology was able to transform an entire culture. Ask anyone under the age of 35 what a peer-to-peer network is, and I’ll bet that they’ll be able to tell you what it is in some form. Elastos and the Cyber Republic are returning the Internet to its original decentralized information sharing age. They’re engineering an entire ecosystem that will reinvigorate e-commerce as well as data ownership and governance among other things. The raw ambition of the project is what attracts me. It is an insanely difficult problem to solve, but myself and both teams are up for the challenge.

3) You’ve spoken about how you found Elastos in the past , but now that you’ve spent more time than most average investors exploring Elastos, what are some of your most exciting “discoveries” you’ve uncovered related to Elastos and the Cyber Republic?

The most exciting discovery for me when exploring the Elastos tech stack was that it wasn’t simply “a blockchain project” where the only value was in the trading of the currency. I was most fascinated with the use of the Carrier Network because of the speed and simplicity it offers the application developer compared to waiting for transactions or executions on a blockchain. It significantly lowers costs for the developer and the end user, and I hadn’t seen that done in a blockchain-esque project before. Regarding the Cyber Republic, I was most excited by how accessible they were. When I was looking to get involved, everyone reached out and connected me with individuals that helped get me up and running in very short order. From there, the Cyber Republic listed ways I could help with ELA and get compensated for my time, which you never see in most open source projects! Elastos had community in-mind from the genesis, and I think that’s especially rare!

4) Are you involving yourself in the Cyber Republic? Doubtlessly, the Elastos Foundation has been actively trying to reach out to you, so what roles are you considering and what have you agreed to undertake?

I started taking on small projects from the Cyber Republic team, mostly fixing bugs here and there or doing some videos on topics that I found most interesting. After speaking to the Cyber Republic and the Elastos Foundation, I have decided to get involved and contribute as much as ten hours per week (and possibly more in the future) in order to assist in the development of Elastos and related products and materials. At the beginning, these might be simple things such as developer on-boarding tools and videos to ease introduction to development with Elastos, and going forward, maybe full-blown products powered by Elastos!

5) What is your personal vision for the Cyber Republic, and what excites you the most about this vision?

I think the Cyber Republic is the core “community” behind the development of Elastos. When you’re developing an ecosystem as large as the one that Elastos is targeting, you can’t have a single group of developers slogging away; you have to have an army of armies, and the Cyber Republic is at the core of that movement. They encapsulate everything from growth marketing teams, to media publishers, to developers. What excites me most is the vision I have that, in the future, the Cyber Republic is working in lockstep with the core development teams in order to release materials and even products based on the latest Elastos features. Developer tools for the latest feature releases are available in a matter of clicks, reducing friction such that any developer team would ask how they could not build their platform on top of Elastos.

6) In what areas do you think the Cyber Republic needs the most active growth in, right now? What can the community do to support this? What leaders are most needed at this stage?

The Cyber Republic needs as much help as it can get on the technical development side of things. We need to make sure that every major feature that Elastos releases has corresponding source code, documentation, and tools to get developers up and running in a snap. In order to accomplish this, we need developers familiar with build systems and technical writers that are willing to write on-boarding documentation so that developers interested in developing their applications on Elastos–ones that likely haven’t developed on the blockchain before–can have clear answers to their questions. From there, the ecosystem flourishes. Those leaders could be people like the core contributors to Riot OS! Imagine having Elastos at the core of an operating system that can run on most any hardware platform designed for IoT.



Business leaders and entrepreneurs are also needed because we need enterprises to flourish on the platform, so we need to forge partnerships with software and hardware vendors as well as educational institutions to get new talent on board.



7) Finally, what is a fun fact about yourself that we’d never guess just by looking at you?

I collect classic arcade games and pinball machines. I’ve even gone so far in the past to build a pinball machine from scratch consisting of hundreds of feet of wiring, custom mechanics, as well as custom software.

Thanks so much for your time, Jimmy!

CR Guides



Feel free to leave a comment with your concerns, questions, and suggestions (or praises), for the Cyber Republic.

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