About this Prize

What is the forum?

The Network Society Forum (nsforum.net) is a censorship-resistant forum to read and write articles about network societies, which are defined as societies of interconnected self-governing communities leveraging digital networks and evolving through opt-in experiments in governance and culture.

It is currently built with an open-source, decentralized Ceramic back-end that only allows the authors of a piece to edit it, thereby making it impossible to censor at a technical level. If those in control of one front-end censor someone, then anyone may spin up another front-end.

See the full vision for the forum here.

Context

This project was initially instigated and funded by Noah Chon Lee and Andrew J Starr, who each funded a prize to build the MVP, which was co-created by Mikey Cherneski in the USA and Michael Jola-Moses in Nigeria by forking Discourse. However, the old language that Discourse is written in and the difficulty in adapting it led us to launch another prize won by Renee Davis, who built a decentralized forum stack using the Orbis SDK.

We onboarded some initial users to write articles and identified the following areas for improvement:

1. The posts take a while to load, which might be improved with SSG.
2. Initially logging in using Silk wallet is cumbersome and could be smoother. Ideally, it should be as easy as receiving an OTP to an email, like in Privy.
3. Users accidentally misuse the editor and have difficulty formatting posts.

The costs and roadmap can be seen here.

See the code here.

How to Participate

This prize is focused on fixing the issues with the editor and is open for anyone to pursue.

We have a telegram chat for those who have been involved in this project and are welcoming contributors.

Contact us here if you are interested: https://t.me/+JPR_RLuGPMdlNzgx