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title: Blockchain Commons 2021 June Meeting Notes

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# Blockchain Commons 2021 June Meeting Notes

6/3/2021 11AM PDT

## Meeting Contents
Welcome 2nd year BC Interns!

### Security and Privacy
- Video never required, hopefully offboarding Zoom once we have a good option
- More in future meetings
- Everyone has different
### Other Best Practices
- Use Signal channel for asynchronous communication during Zoom call
- Do not overcommit yourself!
- Opportunity to level up skills, etc.

### BC Focus
Big Q: What are the unmet needs?
- Improving bad foundations
- Build things and build community

Last year went well! Hoping to build on it!
HRF funded this year
Hope all interns continue to participate in BC / other open-source groups and efforts

July-Aug? Due to cycle, BC specific Project Management

### This meeting
Planning for success
- Usual planning phase shorter (1 week), we will spend 2 weeks planning

### Intern Requirements
- Lead at least 1 project, eg. team manager
    - Ask for help
    - Make decisions (saying no)
    - Listening and willing to accept input from individual contributors
    - Scope can be small, see examples below
- Collaborate on at least 1 project, eg. individual contributor
    - Supporting other people

#### Project Examples
Technical
- A technical paper
- Coding projects
- Proof of Concept
- Survey

Non-technical
- Documentation
- Survey
- Law requirements

### Compensation
Small bitcoin payment for work completed

### Other Resources and Opportunities
Discussions
Office Hours
Guests

### Books and articles mentioned
Francisco:
https://www.amazon.com/Free-Freedom-Richard-Stallmans-Software/dp/0596002874
Nick:
https://breedlove22.medium.com/money-bitcoin-and-time-part-1-of-3-b4f6bb036c04
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/
https://www.amazon.com/This-Book-Will-Save-Time-ebook/dp/B085PVW6M2

## Intros in this meeting
Prayank
Sakura
Francisco
Nick
Akshay

## Action Items
Start next meeting with remainder of introductions
Ian
David/Solairis
Abraham
Victoria
Namcios

Next all hands: Thu Jun 10, 2021 7pm – 8:30pm United Kingdom Time

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6/10/2021 11AM PDT


## Remainder of intros
Ian
David/Solairis
Abraham
Victoria
Harsh
Namcios
Sunint

## Projects

[HackMD Project Roadmap Link](https://hackmd.io/Iz3Bs-MeR0itwgnHYKg4sg)

New Wyoming law - explain what it means
    Self Sovereign identity
    Work: Surveys, Explanation of subjects
    Less Identity Movement (Netherlands, Switzerland, New Zealand, etc.)
    Trustless Identity side - most needed subject area
        Project: Amira
        eg. Human rights should allow you to have free speech
        Document and make more understandable
        Framework for building DID, etc.
    A mentor available for those interested in learning how to create use cases

DAO - opportunities on subject
    Bill in Wyoming, applied to bitcoin

Digital Identity
    BTCR, first decentralized method

Mori
    How to express right for execution of contracts when incapacitated, dead, not around
    
Refactoring Spotbit

Bitcoin Fee tool

Outline and write mini script chapter in bitcoin course

## Everyone's top projects currently
Akshay: DID
Francisco: Timelock work, Mori, mini script
Prayank: Discrete law contracts
Namcios: HRF Use Cases and Tools for Human Rights Activists

## Resources shared during meeting
Ian: https://otoco.io/

## Coming soon
Next Thursday: Tor, HRF, use case, etc.
Following Thursday: Deeper bitcoin items (dev, but also have documentation needs)

## Action items
Complete Doodle from Vinay to express interest




# June 17th Notes
Non-technical contributions invaluable; 
Prioritizing projects, especially those aligned with HRF
Everyone must lead at least one project
Two big items for today: 
Use cases
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/2021May/0021.html
(Joe big in VC and DID)
Defining feature sets based on use cases; every feature must have a use case; writing use cases should be part of every developer toolkit; use cases guide development; defines needs and helps to prioritize features to be developed

User Engagement Model - AMIRA? https://w3c-ccg.github.io/amira/
Why engagement model?: 
Firstly, includes how to find tool, how they enroll/onboard, what happens when things go wrong, what happens when customers leave.
Secondly, really fleshes out security requirements, helps to avoid security issues downstream; risk modeling process(+1), how to think about risk (can't make everything perfect, can spend forever trying to perfect security (think sshetp? not used though more secure))
chapter on risk modeling in smart custody book in bc repo

Possibly interview HRF type users for use cases

* Ian - Esplora lead. ALso contributing to HRF burner laptop assembly and spanish translation. Looking to contribute development with other projects, possibly spotbit fee estimation?
(esplora tracks things beyond bitcoin-core, tor friendly vs electrum which is not)
* Harsh - spotbit, project management and devops/cloud support
(spotbit developed through use case(in venezuela, needs to move privacy coins to new multisig, how to preserve privacy from single sig to multisig cheaply), finding price when privacy paramount. Not stable, needs refactoring. Like to have: fee estimation beyond one day(finding day to execute tx wth lowest cost within a [week, month]). Possibly aligned with esplora)
* Abraham - tracking current laws in states and internationally; DAO laws; select committee meetings. Risk modeling interesting. Constrained on time due to IOHK and university obligations (wyoming DAO bill needs updating, hoping to make it tech agnostic; differentiating DAOs from btc vs eth vs... via use cases; discussion in community chat). Cool with working into the fall
* Akshay - Technical: bitcoin fee estimation, spotbit sability, feature exploration. Nontechnical: onchain DIDs? BTCR DID https://w3c-ccg.github.io/didm-btcr/ (use case, doctor providing verifiable envoy across border)
* Yingzi - Leading HRF centric use case, such as interviewing; exploring addtional use cases; interested in legal aspects, especially in California and China. Learn by studying Wyoming for best practices to extend to other regions. Has rudimentary Mandarin (red cross paper contributers to interview, red cross surgeon to interview)
* David - PR problem around bitcoin operation/efficiency/energy consumption. Want to work on open science approach(censorship resistance), open access; defining use cases; engagement models; (implementations with tor-gaps) (pursuasion not always about the facts, detractors find ways to rile emotions to distract potential users away from. Intellectual appeal not always effective. Find ways that work. Interesting note about $100 bill supporting terrorism abroad as few US citizens don't use $100 bills; may be a way to strike a chord with population?)
* Francisco - Nontechnical: visiting suburbs of lower socioeconomic neighborhoods with less technical knowledge to help them adopt tech and document the process; Educating even technical people about valuable features / best practices; replicating equitable approaches (such as protecting seeds cost effectively in poor regions);
* Namcios - Tails scrypt; Risk modeling; Open to working towards HRF use cases + tools; (reminder Namcios pseudo-anon; documenting process of operating anon/pseudoanon best practices to balance security with practicality) (trustless tails?)
* Nick - Familiarizing with spotbit and sweeptool, spotbit refactor with Akshay, spotbit fee estimation? Coin fungibility with lightning research, turning into tor-gapped service; integrating lightning with gordian server; linux scripting (payjoin, pay for services on torgapped servers over payjoin; hope to see distributed spotbit servers)
* Sunint - HRF and documentation, interviewing and engagement model. Nontechnical support of other projects; finding use cases, user engagement. 
* Prayank - HRF use cases; Offline transactions, issue for journalists and others in areas with internet shutdowns. Operating over sms [link]; bc-bytewords (designed bc-ur standard for animated qr; splits them to be transmittable in pieces; can be used to send piecemeal over text); Managing many addresses/unique addresses to different parties, BIP47? (instead of giving a btc address, give an account, sweep that account for addresses? creating new account maps; but flaw that other transactions trackable within same period); 
* Victoria - Advocacy around identity and applications in self sovereignty omg spelling; less (legally enabled self-sovereign) identity movement; risk modeling; (how to do identifers in different jurisdictions/countries; finding support for trustless forms). Documentation/editing support

Coming educational call over risk modeling for those interested in July/August. Welcome to ideas for educational calls that can be scoped