Hi, Pioneers!
This talk is about Core Team initiated apps
Pi Core Team will develop and improve certain apps or guide a few ecosystem apps, to experiment
and create Pi utility and to build the ecosystem and organize the community.
I’ll introduce a few apps that the Core Team is considering improving and building ourselves or guiding
ecosystem third-party developers to build, pending community input for us to prioritize.
We’d like to hear what Pioneers think about these apps after watching this session, so we can decide
how we will spend our time and resources next. Please express your thoughts in the Topic on the
homescreen. Keep in mind that the Core Team’s Phase 2 mission is to achieve value creation
through utility and decentralization while growing the community and building the ecosystem.
Now, I am going to talk about the apps to improve and build.
Pi Chats has been the oldest and most used app inside Pi.
This is the place where Pi community’s global conversations are held, where old Pioneers discuss Pi and socialize,
and where new Pioneers are helped by other peers when they get to know Pi. Over the past
few months, we have added a new add-on feature, Topics, to facilitate forum-like and theme-based
discussions. Next, we’d like to improve Pi Chats, including better moderation features, overall
organization and usability, better spam control system either automatically or crowdsourced. The
Core Team has been considering and exploring mechanisms to integrate the usage of Pi inside
Pi Chats for spam and troll controls, and also for achieving more constructive conversations.
If such experiments are successful, not only would it help experiment with the Pi utility,
but it also benefits the community because Pioneers will enjoy the chat rooms more,
and more community activities can be organized through the Pi Chats.
The next app we're considering building is called
Home screen social media channel. So far, the Pi app’s home screen has been
used by only the Core Team to make announcements and organize community activities. In a sense,
the Core Team has been the only content creator on the home screen. However, we have plans to
slowly open up the home screen channel for more content creators other than the Core Team itself
to broadcast their content. For example, the home screen channel can be initially opened up
to content created by chats moderators who may provide bite-size educational content about Pi
for the community to address Pioneers’ questions in addition to answering them in the chats.
Next, it can be opened to maybe good content creators
on the internet even outside Pi Network, e.g. influencers on youtube or instagram,
to bring more interesting content for Pioneers inside the app and to experiment with Pi utility.
The type of content can expand from initially only about Pi to more general good quality content.
Of course, the Core Team expects to integrate certain use of Pi to curate the content and
organize non-core-team creators' access to the home screen channel that reaches millions of
Pioneers. This is not only part of the Pi utility experiment but also attempts to
innovate on how quality content can be achieved and consumed in social media.
Inside the Core Team, we call this idea: a scarce social media channel, as opposed to the currently
abundant millions of social media channels where everyone can host, on instagram,
Youtube, for example. Such abundance of channels also creates low signal-to-noise ratio,
information overload, and information sinos caused by the machine-learning algorithm curation.
The Pi scarce social media channel tries to solve such problems of social media by providing
high signal content through the moderation of a token mechanism and human crowd curation.
Now, I am going to talk about a couple Apps we want to guide. First is
Crowdsourcing-based Translation app.
As Pioneers are from almost every corner of the world, the fact that our app is only in
English has been an impeding factor for our users to understand the Pi vision, mission or
generally how the app works, and difficult for our existing users to explain to potential new users.
The translation of the app into different languages has been something that the community
has been asking for, and we want to build. While the Core Team can build the translations of the
app in a centralized way, the Core Team would also like to see or guide third-party ecosystem developers
to create a translation-crowdsourcing app. The crowdsourcing-based translation app will allow
us to decentralize the burden of translations to an unlimited number of languages in the world and
also provides agility on an on-going basis when new updates or interfaces are deployed to the app.
This translation app will receive voluntary translations of all texts of the Pi app, including
app actions, instructions or announcement content. It will also need to institute a
mechanism for evaluation, selection and validation by other peer Pioneers to ensure the accuracy of
the translation in specific languages. Then, it automatically plugs into the backend of the Pi app
so that phones with the specific language setting can display our app in that language.
This app will be primarily an ecosystem app for the benefits of the community.
The second community ecosystem app that we want to guide is
Community KYC solutions
Pi has a strict policy of one account per person.
This requires a high degree of
accuracy to establish that members in the network are genuine human beings,
in order to prevent individuals being able to hoard Pi through creating fake accounts unfairly.
So KYC is an important and necessary procedure inside our ecosystem. Current Pi KYC is conducted
by a third-party KYC provider. However, as mentioned multiple times, the ultimate goal
is to enable every Pioneer in the network to pass KYC or prove their humanness eventually for the
Mainnet. Due to cost, coverage and accessibility by Pioneers in different regions, we hope to
develop a decentralized, reliable, low- to no-cost KYC process customized for the Pi community.
We hope this project to be a Core-Team-guided and community-sourced project because all Pioneers
care about how KYC is conducted, and also because third-party developers from different regions may
be more aware of different regional challenges or issues in the KYC process. The Core Team
will lead the project but welcome Pioneers and developers who are interested in solving this
problem generally or specifically for different regions to contribute ideas and engineering time.
If the project is community-sourced, the code of the KYC project needs to be open-source so that
it’s publicly auditable. We’ve received many KYC proposals from the community. This project hopes
to gather such community enthusiasts and more to develop our community KYC solution together. One
of such KYC proposals from community members will be demonstrated following this Core Team talk.
These are the apps that the Core Team have been considering improving,
building and guiding, and we want to hear what you think.
Later in this session are talks by Third Party developers. Through the convention developer
speaker applications, we received many application submissions and surfaced a few interesting ideas
and thoughts by Pioneers about potential apps on the Pi platform. We selected a few of such
developers who were able to articulate their app or idea, and present the demo in a video
to showcase here. The later presentations also include an update from our first
third-party app - FeverIQ, about what Pioneers’ contributions to their app have turned into.
There is a Disclaimer: Selection of the apps to be presented at the convention
does not mean the acceptance of the app to be deployed
on the Platform. The selection of the apps to be deployed will be a separate process
later. The convention is meant to foster discussions and further inspire innovations.