Lisk Discovery becomes a platform
Today, i am glad to share a huge milestone in the development of www.liskdiscovery.com. Releasing the new functionality marks more than just some extra features.
Brief History
My mission as delegate endro and as a proud community member was always to create tools for the community. In April 2018 i launched a new tool called Lisk Discovery, a news aggregator for Lisk Projects and Sidechains. The tool had a timeline with 74 articles! It is actually not so impressive.. So i knew i could do better.
What if the platform was more than a news aggregator? What if the platform can become the number one repository to find projects, manage own projects and interact with users that used the project within the Lisk community? We can definitely go on with the huge list of ideas but let us first with the first ideas.
In August 2018, my first what if was ready to go in production. The first iteration initially had 2 goals:
- Show a rough collection of tools and sidechains with the associated information.
- Show where the platform will be working towards in the next few years: A collaboration platform where developers can work for any project in our ecosystem.
The new platform
It is time to launch the second iteration. The release contains features such as user management, user profiles, experiences, video tutorials, topics, project management, UI/UX improvements and much more small updates. Let’s look at everything in detail.
User management
First things first: Why do we even need it?
Community members and delegates control their project description mainly in #delegate-campaigns or #projects on rocket.chat. Additionally delegates contacted me to change their details on the first iteration of Lisk Discovery. What if community members can create and manage their own projects?
User management was a necessary step towards a fully autonomous platform where me and a team (in the future) can just create features and not control the content.
The beautiful thing about the feature is that delegates can display their projects on a dedicated page that does not disappear after a few minutes in a chat message or a reddit post. They can link their space by simply using adding the given username at the root of the Lisk Discovery website -> https://www.liskdiscovery.com/endro
Project Management
Exploring Github and adding Lisk related projects is a real fun job but sometimes i can make mistakes in describing the project. Community members asked for small changes such for the description or the website url. A way to improve this process is to add the ability for users to create, update or delete the projects they developed.
Creating a project has the advantage for users to choose what our community sees and reads about the project. The process to create a project was divided in 4 different stages.
Type
The most important one is to choose what type of project you are developing. Choosing a type is very important towards the future when sidechains come into play.
VCS
Is your project open-source? Great! Use this step to add your Github repository.
Basic Information
Parts of the project such as name, description, website or even a youtube video where you explain how the project works.
Topics
Nobody in the community knows all projects within the Lisk ecosystem. Wouldn’t it be great to explore projects according to the topics they are addressing? Well, i was thinking the same!
Topics are currently revolve mostly around Lisk Core. Exploring the current topics can help you find projects the monitor your node, use alternative wallets and much more.
In the future the section Topics will evolve towards topics of sidechains with other sections focusing more on the developed tools.
Video
Users can add youtube videos to their project page. The feature enables users to have a better understanding on how the project is used. The project owner or fellow community members can create a video and show us how the project has to be used. The step has been created to help the community understand the problem you are addressing.
Experiences
While the feature is still very rough, i also wanted to have a way for the community to interact with a project they like and use. Experiences enables a community members to give feedback and show which features of the project they really like.
Other features?
Most of my time went to improving the overview of the project page. For the first time in the Lisk Discovery history i made a case study by looking at other overview pages and was really impressed on how big companies utilise different techniques to show such information.
For the projects page i changed the layout from one big timeline to smaller rows divided by a specific topic or category. The page will evolve according to the user feedback but for now it was a real improvement for users to find specific projects.
The Growth Initiative
Me (delegate endro) am stunned on how the internet already changed our society and what chances it gave me as a developer.
Lisk, Lisk Discovery and my current day job wouldn’t exist without the internet.
Yet i think we can create even more chances for those who are under-resourced, that really would like to build a decentralised application or tool to help delegates or others.
The Growth Initiative is program that will guide projects in the program by providing services such as network nodes, mentorship by experienced delegates or external partners and many more services to come.
The program is still a concept so anything can change in the near future. To guaranty a program of decent quality i have set the date of the initial startup / official announcement to April 2019.
So stay tuned or if you want help out, contact endro on rocket.chat
Next steps!
First of all i would like to thank my donators and voters. The help i got in voting weight or donations really helped me work hard in getting this new iteration done.
For my next developments, i will start on group accounts, multiple project owners, custom landing page for authenticated users, custom proposals, synchronisation of Github issues and many more. (i can keep on going on the features i have in mind)
The platform will keep on existing and improving but as you know a website is coupled with a cost. Voting for endro would enable Lisk Discovery to grow together with the community and Lisk. It would be enable me to put more resources towards the development of Lisk Discovery and The Growth Initiative. I would be able to hire fellow developers, setup better development environments and much more to create an awesome platform build to help the community.
https://explorer.lisk.io/address/9096358076943957197L
Come take a look at https://www.liskdiscovery.com and vote for endro
