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Open by Default

William Chong

@likecoin

Trying to run a startup with open source culture in mind

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Who am I?

William Chong
(former) Game Developer
Fullstack developer of LikeCoin
Mainly contributes to crypto and web related oss project, e.g. Metamask, Nuxt.js, lunie

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What does LikeCoin do?

Hong Kong based startup
Public blockchain for content monetization, attribution and distribution
Media partners include Standnews, Matters, HKcnews, Inmediahk
69,000+ Likers, 247,000+ contents by 9,600+ creators on 1000+ media @June

https://like.co/

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https://commits.top/hong_kong.html

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“公司 d code open source 同放上 github” should be a more common practice

Not only opening source code, but open in culture and workflow.

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Sharing in this presentation

what we did to be open
how we minimize extra overhead
what trouble we encountered

Some of these might not be best approach, welcome to share your knowledge!

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(NOT) Sharing in this presentation

Making every single work or tool we use is open, without considering trade off
Suggesting any silver bullets solution

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What contexts this fits best

Internet product startup
Crowdfunding projects
Blockchain/crypto projects �(requires extra trust from your users)

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Why “open”?

Community

Gain trust
Gain loyalty (IKEA effect)
Get feedback from fans

Developer

Get technical feedback
Open source contribution

Brand

User, developer and employer brand

JONO HEY, SKETCHPLANATIONS, CC BY NC

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To whom should you be “open”?

Why should “open” be the default option?

Customers / user community
Technical and developer community
Also Internally!

Like technical debt, transforming from closed to open is costly
Your community might surprise you

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One day when I was committing LICENSE.md...

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Preview

Community update & sharing

Public internal knowledge sharing

Community participation

DAO - Decentralized Autonomous Organization

Open repository

Gitcoin bounties

Open API
Documentation and code samples
Hackathons

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Progress update and community sharing

Keep community updated
Allow basis for community participation
Let people know you are still alive!

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Progress update: How?

Zoom for weekly meeting, why not make it public?
Statistic graph and work log for progress synchronization, why not make it public?
第一次參加LikeCoin 星期一週會感受

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Progress update: Difficulties

Timezone
Language
Privacy
Be careful with your mouth!
Zoom is bad! How about Jitsi?

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Extra: Make your internal sharing public!

Internal knowledge sharing is interesting to external too
Content marketing / brand building

Simple sharing on Github Action

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Community participation

Engage in conversation with your community
Slack / discord / telegram or other online community
We have #likecoin on Matters
Governance system of LikeCoin chain

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Community participation: Difficulties

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Community participation: Difficulties

Not all comments will be supportive, some will be skeptical, some will be antagonistic
A good chance to clarify concepts, understand common misconception, and what the concerns of community are
Affected by how well did you update your community

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Extra: DAO - Decentralized Autonomous Organization

LikeCoin ecosystem is not governed solely by LikeCoin Foundation, but a group of validators
Validators are public, assigned according to amount of LIKE delegated by users
They have power to propose and vote on the future of the ecosystem

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Extra: DAO - proposal

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Technical: Open Repository

Open Source repository allows user to read, understand and contribute your code
Forced good software engineering practice like decouple and proper git message usage
Open standard allow other parties to join: ISCN

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Open Repository: How

We use GitHub
Use public Issue tracker for internal issue report, allow a unified flow for bug reporting
Use Github Project or Trello board to manage issues

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Open Repository: Difficulties

Don’t leak your secret, consider GitGuardian to monitor secret leak (GCP has built in detector)
Timezone and communication overhead on issues, be async
Management and triage overhead
Make sure you have a good linter, tests and CI system to avoid unneeded time spent on reviewing minor code changes.

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Extra: Bounties

https://gitcoin.co/explorer

Example

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Open API

Modern web/app development uses front/backend separation pattern
So your probably have Restful/GraphQL API ready anyway…
Why not open your API using open OAuth 2.0 standard?

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Open API: How?

When designing your API, use JWT for authentication token
Try to classify your API into different scope and permissions
Build a OAuth 2.0 authentication server and authentication flow
Tada! You now have an open API
Write your API documentation properly, we use Postman for develop -> testing -> documentation cycle

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Open API: Difficulties

Designing proper OAuth scope and developer console is hard
Reviewing sensitive scope is time consuming human process
Be careful not to make another Cambridge Analytica
Security audit

https://blog.yorkxin.org/2013/09/30/oauth2-implementation-differences-among-famous-sites.html�Yu-Cheng Chuang’s Blog

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Documentation and Code Samples

We use Postman and documentor for API develop cycle
Sample codes are committed for future reference. We also use codepen & codesandbox.
User guide and developer documentation are written in Gitbook, PR can be made to the repo for correction
Translation would be possible in future using Github integration tool

LikeCoin API Sharing

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Extra: Hackathons

https://matters.news/@likecoin/%E8%AE%9A%E5%AE%A2%E6%9D%BE-likerthon-2020-like-coin-%E7%8B%82%E6%83%B3%E6%9B%B2%E5%BE%8C%E7%BA%8C-bafyreiemfrqhcn6cy3gny6ov6rv2lxiccr7cuh2keeyrx5qtja62p545tm

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Conclusion

This is just our experience, there may be many better ideas.
Ideas might not fit 100% to you, but do begin somewhere and try to be open!
Many of our methods are made possible via blockchain. Blockchain is not only about fintech, join LikeCoin in slack, telegram and facebook to know more!