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title: Quartus Corp Quarterly Forecast

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# Quartus Corp Quarterly Forecast

## A brief review of prior art
Since our inception in late November of last year, Quartus has produced a variety of software on Urbit. These products can largely be grouped into three categories:
* Novel Explorations
* Utilities and Infrastructure
* Toys and Games
### Novel Explorations
#### Why
Persistent identity, data ownership, re-composable routing heirarchies, decentralized-first architecture - All of these differences from the current computing stack are novelly combined in Urbit's design. Software being produced on Urbit benefits from these differences and, where there are novel differences combined in an environment, there are likely to be new niches to fill.

Experimentation with novel software products on Urbit is necessary to realize the full potential of the computational enviornment provided. Quartus has produced, and will continue to produce from time to time, passion projects as proofs of concept in new methods of utilizing Urbit's available resources.

#### What
* Gora - Soulbound NFTs and proof of presence. Debuted at Assembly and now nearly omnipresent on Urbit.
* Orca - Realizing the promise of federated groups. Debuted early February.
* Crow - Stateful libraries and threads (as well as simple talkback) that are easily user-composable (and who's needs are documented in the `%docs` agent - which is sweet) allow users to interact w/ their ship's data based on the primary mode of actual engagement on Urbit, the chatroom.
    * Prebuilt Libraries shipped w/ newest version, debuting early March.
### Utilities
#### Why
The (non-disparagingly said) low-hanging fruit of "Earth" tech clones on Urbit, in addition to flights of fancy, deserve attention.
Reproducting what works on "Earth", on Urbit, particularly products targeted to high-value onboards (DAOs, creators with high content interaction, etc.), is an obvious path towards success.

Quartus has produced tools as we've grown, sometimes for our own use and sometimes for use by groups we value. We are committed to producing additional utilities, likely as they appear as bounties or as groups ask us to produce them, and in those latter occasions ideally for a value swap.
#### What
* Oger - Backup utility for Group Resources, to be expanded
* Expo - Group Management Utility for ~hatryx-lastud
* Ibis - Link Graph public display function for art galleries (resulted in a PR to [graph store](https://) - still waiting on that incidentally)
* Pick - A voting agent, to be expanded (resulted in a PR to core)
### Toys
#### Why
Urbit needs to be playful and engage its users as full persons, not merely as intellects working on a crypto-platform. Gaming on Urbit will exist soon, and likely expand. Quartus has encouraged gaming on Urbit by producing games and aiding in the creation of games through the grants process.

Additionally, Urbit can be used as a "tech toy" for aspiring investigators of computing. Quartus is committed to providing learning experiences to aspiring hooners through apprenticeships, championing work and through making toys on Urbit that encourage users to dabble in the code, themselves.
#### What
* Wrdu - A simple Wordle clone. A foundation for future experiments:
    * Distributed "truth" systems for gaming
        * Slam
        * Wrdu improvements
* Worlds within Worlds - A conceptual project Quartus has imagined where users can create persistent characters that can interact with user-created instances of dungeons.
    * Urbit's distributed nature makes cheating inevitable and we are researching modes of gaming where cheating is expected and maybe even encouraged, as well as modes of server-distribution that allow independent bodies to enforce arbitrary rules against players using their server.
## A story of things to come
In the upcoming quarter, Quartus intends to complete work on the following:
### Utilities
#### Pick
A voting agent. (app complete, awaiting updates)
##### Key Features
* Uses ring signatures to anonymize voting
* Voters and Poll-Takers both validate each vote as it comes in and flag "liars" where appropriate
##### New Features
* Voting Modalities (consensus methods)
* Arbitrary Data Execution On Consensus (methods already explored in Crow)
* Security Review of Ring Signaturers (underway)
* Front end support

#### Keep
A generalized backup agent. (app complete, awaiting updates)
##### Key Features
* Arbitrarily yank the state out of an agent (explored in Oger)
* Save the state somewhere (also in oger)
##### New Features
* Work w/ Tlon to wire up drum-get allowing import of files from unix environment into stateful agents
* Explore and investigate methods of transmitting backups via ames, outside ames but via network, storing to non-harddisk solutions.

### Grants and Bounties
Quartus intends to serially complete bounties (ideally several) in the next quarter. We have just elected to take on the `Books` bounty, which we intend to complete within the first two months of the quarter.

### Documentation
Quartus is committed to documenting all of their agents in the `%docs` agent and strongly encourages other teams to start including documentation there as well - we should dogfood it. We will complete our documentation for all existing agents, in `%docs`, in this quarter.

### Finding the Alpha (Investigations)

#### Gall Emulation for Context/Plugins
We want to be able to arbitrarily wrap our agents in libraries or plugins, akin to dbug wrapper. This could facilitate low-code/no-code options for users to augment agents they receive from other hooners, like our backup agent Keep. We will begin investigating what Gall Emulation would look like and whether there are other modes of interacting with our installed agents (outside of modifying code) that we could explore in pursuit of the aforementioned aim.

#### Knowledge System(s)
As discussed in my Developer Talk yesterday, we are going to explore new truth-making modalities on urbit. We have a number of ideas about how information might be better conveyed and will begin an investigation of these methods.