Metagame Profiles App
Notes on 13/05/2020 meeting
So I think the conclusion for the meeting is that we went too fast defining the data models, and we need to step back a little bit, start with less things, and adding more features over time when we know exactly what we want.
On frontend
We need to redefine what data will be displayed on the frontend and then have a call with Saimano and the designer friend of Peth to align the specs.
Then, start creating design on figma, eventually re-iterate.
Once this is done, we can start lay down the base of our UI component system, implement the interface with mock data and finally integrate with the exiting app with real data.
On data architecture
Our main concern is: where should live our data. We have our own database, we have profile information from 3box, XP and quests from sourcecred, membership from DAOs…
At the begining we planned to store all of that in our database, but that poses problem of data synchonization/replication and adds a “trustful” layer, not necessarly required.
By keeping the data where it is now (blockchain/IPFS/github), it ensures it is always up-to-date, and “trustable”, but makes us lack some powerful features such as searching, filtering etc that we are used to with “real” databases.
First iteration proposition
I will describe here what I propose as a first iteration we could deploy
On quests
Quest are things that people can achieve. For now, it is the “initiatives” stored as json in sourcecred repository. So we can leave this out of our DB right now.
Eventually add a lambda function or remote schema that returns extracted data from github (via graphql mesh)
On guilds
We don’t have now exactly a definition of what is a Guild. Some ideas out of the wild are: a DAO, a project on Everest, or something that we can just create/manage on the app.
The main problem here is that there must be a way of how the guild member are managed. For a DAO, that’s straightforward with token holders. For not DAOs, there must be some kind of permission system with roles, defining who can add member to a guild or not, for the least.
We leave also this out of the DB for now. Eventually use a remote schema that return membership information from Moloch DAOs from TheGraph.
On accounts
“Accounts” refers to user’s account out of metagame, such as github, discord etc…
As it will be mandatory for our users to login with a web3 wallet, they will all have an ethereum address so I suggest we put it in the “Player” model instead of inside an other table, and leave all the other profiles on the “Account” table, for convenience purposes.
On XP
I think that’s important to keep at least the totalXP and rank in our database, and have a CRON job that regularly update them from sourcecred. Eventually a function/remote schema that fetches the history from github to display the graph.
On profile
For general purpose profile informations (name, description…), I think it is better to leave this in 3Box, and let the user go to edit their profile on the 3Box official app, so that data is universal to all apps.
For metagame custom info (why do you like metagame, what’s your meme and other metaphysicial stuff), we can either store it in a specific 3box space, or in our database. Storing in our database have great advantages in term of performance, and also allows to makes people be able to “look for all the growth hackers in Lisbon” for instance.
On sourcecred identities
So we have identities in our DB, and identities in profiles.json in sourcecred’s github.
I believe one source of truth would be better. Having to make pull request to add players or update accounts in sourcecred is not really convenient.
So I think using our DB with Profile{id, ethAddress} => Accounts{ type, identifer} would be better.
I suggest that, when sourcecred CRON task starts, it fetches all this data from our DB and write it in the profiles.json, then calculate the scores.
We could keep a copy of the profiles we have now and once all the users have created an account on metagame app, we just put back the accounts they had (discourse, discord…)
