Media Sifter Roadmap

2017–2018

The Origins

Media Sifter was born almost two years ago as a thesis project at CIID (Copenhagen institute of Interaction Design) to reduce the impact of misinformation and instigate critical thinking.

In early 2017 the original idea of an enhanced news aggregator pivoted to integrate a blockchain-powered validation platform. This integration would allow to incentivise collective action and solve an inherent problem in today’s media landscape: trust.

Currently the Media Sifter team is working on the two core aspects of the platform, the news aggregator and the SIFT Protocol. The latter is a community-driven open-network to source information from the crowd and qualify it through blockchain-powered user-consensus and is designed to be used beyond Media Sifter.

Product Development

Raising large amounts of money for projects without a product, IP or technology has become the default for the blockchain space. We want to avoid this by delivering a representative MVP, build a committed community as well as finalise the Whitepaper before setting the ICO in motion.

For product development reasons, all 2017 product releases will be off-chain.

If you are familiar with the lean startup methodology popularized by Eric Ries, we are applying the Build → Measure → Learn loop. Attempting to do so on the blockchain would just slow down our process with marginal benefits. This off-chain review process will allow us more flexibility to gather data on user behaviour and interactions, before we develop the protocol on the Ethereum blockchain.

Our first prototype will be out in a few weeks and we want to have our early adopters tackle it first. The innovators of the news industry and the blockchain space that don’t care about buggy software or occasional breakdowns.

We will be improving and upgrading the platform with two additional releases through the end of 2017. By 2018, we are anticipating that the Ethereum infrastructure will have developed considerably and will allow us to introduce testnet functionality to the platform. If things progress as planned, a mainnet release of Media Sifter is scheduled for the last quarter of 2018.