This year has been an epic ride for us so far. This spring, we delivered the Kusamaverse to the Dotsama community. We also got our milestone 2 goals approved by the Kusama treasury. We’ve made our entire stack open-source. We’ve been present at a bunch of incredibly cool events meeting the community. Thousands of hours of work, hundreds of tickets and more meetings than we’d like to admit :-)
After such an intense period of activity — it’s a valuable exercise to look back at your achievements, re-evaluate your goals and learn from your mistakes. This is something we have been doing with a specially designed process we call “Momentum Reboot” and are happy to share our method and the results with the community.
The “Momentum Reboot” is an organisation-wide process that we’ve been working on publicially (in the Kusamaverse, of course) where we get everyone involved in the core team aligned and start to look at what we want to achieve in the future — as well as taking into account the lessons we’ve learnt so far this year.
Our idea is that everyone in the organisation brings their own unique personal and professional experience to the table, and having everyone’s input on decision making and project definition therefore by default elevates our strategy and results.
Out of two weeks of intense communication, brainstorming and solutioning we identified ten projects, which have been the focus of our work for the past summer. For getting together, we use one of the first meetings everyone of us ever attended as a child, a Show and Tell: every team working on a project communicates their progress, blockers and successes.
This isn’t just a one way process — everyone else asks clarifying questions and give their feedback on a project. Again, we do this in the Kusamaverse, in public, enabling the community to ask those questions and start contributing.
For us, it’s been an incredibly productive way of doing things, and the amount of progress that has gone on with each of these projects has been amazing.
The ten projects (and a brief introduction to each) are as follows:
1. The Architecture project
The Momentum stack is a complicated combination of different back and front end technologies. The goal of this project is to deliver a high level architecture description that will be used for onboarding new developers, as well as allowing the community at large to understand exactly what is going on in the backend. This will also help us rapidly onboard open-source collaborators to our repositories.
2. Front-end refactoring
To build the frontend for the metaverse is a tricky thing — there are so many possible future use cases and it is incredibly important to create a system that will allow us to tackle them. A big push during this project is to move to a modular architecture, to allow code and components to be rapidly re-used. Converting existing components and elements to this new way of developing will also allow us to add features in a more rapid fashion.
3. Controller restructuring
At the heart of the backend is the Controller. It is responsible for pretty much everything that goes on inside the Momentum stack — from relaying user positions, keeping the validator cloud up to date and even which memes to display on the dashboards. There are several different elements to the Controller, and this project is aimed at not only unifying this service, but also improving the existing data model, which will speed up development in the future and allow for more complex functionalities to be added.
4. The World Builder
This is one of the larger projects we are working on — it’s an incredibly complex one but one that is very close to our hearts: allowing any user to create a customised metaverse while going through an epic experience. This touches on everything from the back-end systems to the UX work to make this a simple but epic experience.
5. The Momentum Plugin Framework
This is tied very closely to the world builder project — changing our current stack to be plugin compatible, allowing anyone to create useful plugin functionality that can be used to power a Momentum metaverse. Imagine, while setting up a metaverse you decide you want a specific bit of functionality to be used — it should be as simple as ticking a box to get the functionality installed.
6. Running a node
If you’ve taken a look at our open-source code ( https://github.com/momentum-xyz/ ) — you will see getting a metaverse up and running is a complicated process — databases need to be installed, services started and everything hooked up. The goal of this project is to greatly simplify this process — meaning anyone with hosting experience should be able to get a Momentum node running within two hours — without our help!
7. The Atmosphere project
How do you express yourself in the metaverse? This project is aimed at creating functionality that allows a user to express themselves while being inside the metaverse — in a way which not only communicates their feelings to other users, but also adds to the overall atmosphere of the experience.
8. User stats — public monitoring
We are incredibly transparent about both how we work and how we build — and to aid in our transparency, we want to make a lot of the user data we have available to the public. We also want to start collecting new metrics to help people understand how the metaverse is used, so that everyone can benefit from these metrics and grow their own projects in the metaverse. This is a big project that touches on many different disciplines, everything from data analysis to GDPR.
9. Automated testing project
Testing should be at the heart of every software development project. But it can be very complicated to set up automated testing in the hybrid 2D/3D front end system that we use as part of the Momentum Stack. This project is dedicated to creating an army of bots to test all the little (and big) things that users should be able to do.
10. The Litepaper
One of the most asked questions on our Discord is “When will the Litepaper be released?”. This project is dedicated to that task. Incredible progress has been made with the Litepaper already this year, and a lot of hard work and research has been put into it. It is a very complicated document and will touch on everything that powers Momentum — including details of the DRIVE token and the tokenomics behind it. We are also incredibly excited to be able to share it with you in the upcoming months.
This blog post celebrates our first ‘cycle’ of the reboot process. All of the projects have moved forward in awesome ways — and we love that we enabled both our organisation and the community to get fully aligned on our current undertakings.
We warmly invite you to join our Show & Tell-sessions, every Monday at 15.00 CET in the Kusamaverse to learn and contribute! Click here to move this invite into your agenda.
