After launching the Acropolis network in late June, we are finally ready to announce the plans for our next testnet - Rome.

What is Rome

The Rome network will revolve around one key platform feature - dynamic, flexible and user friendly content directory. Our reasoning for focusing on this task, that may seem narrow and trivial at first glance, is the long term value of it:

  • The platform will allow for new types of content and data, with as little friction as possible.
  • Adding metadata to existing content, improving the user experience through better search, etc.

Roles

As for previous testnets, we will continue to pay community members for participating. In addition to the existing roles, Validator, Council Member and Storage Provider, we will add one new paid role, the Content Curator.

In short, the Content Curator will be responsible for monitoring the content directory. A more detailed description of their responsibilities, requirements and rewards will be covered in a future blog post.

In addition to that, platform members will be able to create Content Creator profiles associated with their membership. This will allow users to create multiple "channels" under the same membership handle.

If you want general information about current and future roles on the Joystream network, go here to read more, and sign up for the newsletter of the roles you find appealing.

Technical and Community

In line with the project goals of openness and transparency, we are producing public Release Plans for each testnet. The most important part of these are the Release OKRs. For Rome, we have decided to separate the OKR in both a technical one, and a community engagement one.

Objective: Introduce a Better Content System

  1. Members can make a Content Creator profile and publish content under this profile.
  2. Introduce the role of staked Content Curators, policed by sudo.
  3. Launch with 3 content types.
  4. Add 1 new content type after release.
  5. Add a new schema for a content type, and migrate only some instances to the new schema.

Objective: Engage community to understand Rome and join us in the future

  1. 20 new creator profiles.
  2. Get 5 active Content Curators.
  3. At least 20 items for each content type enabled at launch.
  4. At least 500 items in total across all content types.

Contribute and Earn Monero

Although Joystream is currently controlled by us at Jsgenesis, our goal has been, and still is, to withdraw and leave it in the hands of our community to own, operate and govern. In order for that transition to work smoothly, we need contributors at all levels. Just participating on our testnets is helping us immensely (hence why we pay monero for doing so), but we need help in other ways as well.

Both detailed specing and opening our project management and planning process on github at an early stage, are steps we hope will attract both technical and managerial talent.

Developers and testers can report issues or make PRs to our repos, following our standard rules. In addition to the small bounties we promise for small "patches" or bug discoveries, feel free to contact us anywhere if you have something larger in mind.


Disclaimer

All forward looking statements, estimates and commitments found in this blog post should be understood to be highly uncertain, not binding and for which no guarantees of accuracy or reliability can be provided. To the fullest extent permitted by law, in no event shall Joystream, Jsgenesis or our affiliates, or any of our directors, employees, contractors,  service providers or agents have any liability whatsoever to any person  for any direct or indirect loss, liability, cost, claim, expense or  damage of any kind, whether in contract or in tort, including negligence, or otherwise, arising out of or related to the use of all or  part of this post, or any links to third party websites.