The Greymass team is proud to announce its full-time commitment, beginning today, to building web solutions powered by blockchain technology. Utilizing their extensive platform and web development experience, Greymass hopes to become a major contributor to the growth and adoption of the Steem blockchain.
The team has carved out a two-month window, through the end of November, to devote to the first phase of their newest business experiment.
This post serves as an introduction to the Greymass vision, a (re)introduction to its team, a broad statement of its goals for the next eight weeks, and an early concept of how the team plans to approach crowdsourcing support for the project. You can look forward to deeper insight into all of these topics, and more, in the form of upcoming regular updates from the team.
What is Greymass?
Self-funded since its foundation nearly two years ago, Greymass is an organization devoted to building next generation platforms for content discovery.
For their first project as a team, the group sought to disrupt the status quo of crowdsourced review sites, and selected the underserved e-liquid market as their testbed. This solution has become a premier resource in its industry, thanks in large part to its autonomous systems that contextualize user generated content.
Looking to the future, Greymass believes that blockchain technology offers massive benefits to these types of platforms. Steem has opened the door for developers, entrepreneurs, and businesses to use the blockchain for more than just financial transactions. Greymass plans to harness this potential and build blockchain-based solutions that anyone can use.
Who is Greymass?
Greymass is currently comprised of two full-time members, @jesta and @paxmagnus.
- @jesta, already an established developer of steem-powered solutions, top 19 witness, and long-time crypto enthusiast, is a full stack engineer that has been building community platforms and content systems since the late '90s.
- @paxmagnus, a relative newcomer to the blockchain, previously held leadership roles in operations, development, and publishing departments supporting online social games, mostly MMOs, for almost fifteen years.
The team's strengths in web technologies, community building, and content systems make them uniquely qualified to execute on their plan, but they can't do it alone. The Greymass team is eager to collaborate with people possessing complementary skillsets, through both short-term engagements and as potential members of our team.
Goals
Greymass' first major milestone will be the release of an open source software solution. A detailed list of what this milestone includes will be outlined in the very near future. The execution phase will take place over the course of two months, followed by it's production-ready release in Q4 of 2016.
In addition to the objectives of the first development milestone, Greymass' efforts will revolve around sharing regular communications that grant insight into the process. Topics will include challenges the team is struggling with, progress updates on development, and details of their business strategy. Greymass welcomes the opportunity to vet their narrative, iterate on their plans, and ultimately make cool products that people actually want to use.
Greymass will also be exploring the viability of its business model during this time, in order to determine if continuing with the project in 2017 and beyond is feasible. During this initial phase, Greymass will be reliant upon community donations and support, as it has no intentions of charging for these open source solutions. While Greymass remains eager to grow the team and become self sustaining, the team believes this exploration period is a necessary first step.
How do I get involved?
The Greymass team would rather officially ask for support after they've rolled out more details of their plan. However, they will soon be seeking two primary avenues of contribution; volunteering time and financial support.
If you already know you're interested in contributing, sight unseen, please contact the team to discuss further. Regardless, any funds or earnings collected on the @greymass account will be accounted for, and used exclusively for project-related purposes.
For additional information or questions, either reply to this post or send us an email at [email protected]. Further replies to the @greymass posts will come from the accounts @jesta (Aaron) or @paxmagnus (Max).
great stuff, very happy to support an effort like this.
Unlike all the big ICOs that are raising $5M+ without any idea on how they are going to execute, you seem to be taking a much more reasonable approach to building! Good luck, I'll be following and supporting.
Thanks @ntomaino!
I've seen that a lot too - lofty goals but no idea on the actual execution of a product. I've become skeptical as hell in my years watching crypto projects, and I'm trying to make sure I apply that same scrutiny to what we are presenting as well.
We (as Greymass) hope that by taking what we know from the web/gaming world, twisting it a little bit to fit crypto, that we'll be able to do something special :)
By the way, I've been running my blog on Steempress (http://www.cryptotokens.io/) and recently noticed that the site is down (with the message "We are sorry, but something went terribly wrong." I don't change any of the code, any idea what is causing it?
There's so much to say and I'm excited to finally be able to talk more freely about it. We have a lot of posts scheduled over the next 8 weeks, about half of which I'll be writing in a more technical manner.
We're going to get a bit of sleep now, but we'll make every effort to answer questions and engage in discussions throughout the day today (Monday).
Thanks!
Looking forward to talking to you!
too many big corporate words for me to comprehend what this is about
Sorry you didn't understand it, craig. Is there anything in particular we can clarify or did the whole thing just go over your head?
We probably tried to take on too much in a single post, but you should have seen it before we streamlined it! :)
way over my head
Sorry about that, we'll try to keep future messages more accessible.
The long and the short of it is that @jesta and I are going to be building open source web software (for the Steem blockchain) full-time at least for the next 2 months. We're going to be writing a lot of posts about what we're doing, and if things go well, we'll keep doing it as our primary business.
We haven't announced exactly what we're building yet, but we think it's going to take Steem to the next level.
Maybe we should have just written that, LOL!
perfect
Welcome aboard, this is such an exciting news to come across! All for one and one for all! Namaste :)
Always a positive message, thanks eric!
This is great news. I will folow your future posts closely to see what exactly are you planning.
With the quality of the tools that you are maiking now and with the right ideas and support from the community the future looks very promissing.
Ps: @jesta - you are my favourite steem platform developer :)
He's my favorite steem platform developer too, LOL!
What makes him your favorite?
:) The way he started developing steemstats.com and how he thorougy explained everything he is producing. It shows pasion. The expertize is obvious :)
I expect great things from you guys.
Fantastic, this is very exciting:)
Great to see the support, we're really excited about it too!
This is exciting. Building a semi/fully-porous organisation is definitely something worth looking into, and I'll be here to offer some of my limited experience with it. Wishing you guys all the best!
Thanks @kevinwong, we definitely might take you up on that. We have built a number of products together, but never anything like this before :)
It's not a hard science yet.. still pretty much just rolling with the punches lol. But maybe there are some best practices learnt out of experience, and quite a number of my older posts were bout it. Catch you in the chats :)
I would be very interested in helping with this project. I spent my career in Web-based, healthcare technology, working with Databases, Code Drops, Testing, Customer Facing Initiatives. In a private conversation, I would be happy to discuss skill set, requirements and provide my resume. Good to see interesting projects coming to SteemIt!
Definitely look forward to chatting with you as we move forward! Over the next couple weeks we're slowly rolling out updates and our vision, as well as the entire plan for this crazy experiment.
Awesome I am so happy that Steem is evolving, this makes me more confident and positve for a better future!
Interesting, looking forward to more details :D
pushing things forward as always @jesta :)
This sounds like an interesting project. I followed @greymass so I can see what is happening. I wish you much success!
It is great seeing people pitch into a community to make it a better place.
Love your post, it is very cryptic yet interesting.
I look forward to hearing more on your plans and will be keeping an eye out on developments.
Welcome.
thanks for sharing knowledge :-)
This is fun. Build / organization and a half full-pore is definitely something worth looking into, and I will be here to offer some of my limited experience with it. Wish you all the best!
I really like how you all have timeboxed the effort - defining two months, seeing what you can get done in that time frame, then reflecting ... very agile :-) Let me know if you need testers!
We definitely will, and we'll be making calls out to the community when it hits that point. Thanks!
Open source = yes :)
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