Thanks for the feedback! I had originally planned to go into more detail, and I appreciate that you voiced your concerns. I’ll try to address them here.
The work is outlined, but there’s a lot more thought and design that needs to be done before it can be handed off to a contract dev. I’ll be taking most of that work off Jon’s plate.
Going back and forth with an outside developer is a tough way to polish a product. Cabin’s goal for the year is 500 active citizens, which means both increasing the benefits and also lowering the bar to citizenship. If we want the core flows like onboarding and minting to be smooth, we need to do many iterations and minor tweaks. I’ll be able to do them as we think of them, without the extra labor and back-and-forth of scoping work, handing it off, reviewing the results, etc.
I can observe our users interacting with the product (eg at ethdenver, at supper clubs, at vibeclipse) and make changes based on that. An outside dev can’t. They also don’t have the context to push back on bad ideas or take initiative to make changes independently.
It’s true there’s some ambiguity here. The biggest overlap I see between this and Cabin Labs is the work under the Network Citizens area. Originally we thought of this as one possible area to try out. But after thinking and talking about it over the last two months, we’ve come to believe this is the most viable path to sustainability and doubled down on it. We now think there’s more to do here than would fit under the original scope of the Cabin Labs proposal. So I’ll be doing space-exploring that’s more narrowly focused on the app and technical work, whereas Jon will be running experiments outside of that.
That said, I’m sure we’ll overlap sometimes. Jon and I will try to be clear on which work is coming from which bucket. To give some examples, we’re pretty sure citizenship needs to be easier to mint and the app needs to be refocused around person-to-person connections. We’re less convinced that merch is going to end up being that important.