Meeting minutes for the July 21st, first MaidSafe Meetup in Montreal (copy of the mail sent on the dev mailing list)
Although, we did not explicitly decide to take notes and distribute them publicly, I am taking an initiative here (only as a messenger!) to inform the rest of the community and inspire other pods to do the same ;-). I am writing them from memory so bear with me if I forgot a few things.
The meeting took place at the Bitcoin Embassy in Montreal, a coworking space that gathers people from various projects, from bitcoin mining operations to legal advice and trading. The place is really nice, technically well-equiped to host meetings that include both physical and virtual participants. One of the attendees was a tech from Bitcoin Embassy and made sure all the tech worked seemlessly. We had a brief visit from a virtual attendee, just long enough to tell us he could not attend the full meeting. It was enough to assert the tech was working and that we will be able to open the future meetings to more virtual attendees in the future.
Including me and the tech from the Bitcoin Embassy, we were five. Two have web development experience, I have extensive compiler dev experience in and for JavaScript, and the other two had many ideas (everyone though was tech-savvy!). Everyone in the group was familiar with many recent developments in crypto-currencies, and we talked about many other competing/complementary projects to MaidSafe.
Francis is showing great energy in getting the Pod off the ground and is pretty enthusiastic about organizing a first conference in Montreal somewhere in October, with the main purpose of generating interest for the system and opening networking opportunities. Francis will prepare slides to give a quick overview of the capabilities of the MaidSafe system and how it differentiates itself from others, especially those built around the Bitcoin blockchain. It should help people that heard a bit about MaidSafe understand better how it works and serve as a conversation starter for the rest of the meeting. I offered to provide feedback once the first slides are completed.
For the purpose of recruiting core devs, I mentioned that I did not think the conference would suit the purpose very well and that we might be better off networking with (the four!) universities in Montreal and organically growing the group by talking with the right people.
We also determined that until the test networks show sufficient stability and enough functionality, which might happen soon, we will wait for creating demo applications and performing public demos of the platform.
Francis set up a Slack room, which provides IRC rooms with persistent conversations, and invited all attendees to join. We will remotely collaborate through it in addition to monthly or bi-monthly meetings with both physical and virtual attendees. Our next meeting will happen somewhere in August, also at the Bitcoin Embassy. Francis will choose a date. Since Francis expects to move away sometime in the Fall, somebody else will have to take the lead in calling meetings. I offered to do it (until somebody else come forward ;-)).
Finally, in terms of technical stuff, we talked about doing a browser extension/local web server that could serve as a bridge between the browser technologies for developing apps and the Safe Network. I offered to code the bridge that will expose the MaidSafe APIs to JavaScript. However, as my summer is getting pretty busy, much of the development will probably happen in the Fall. Francis and Jacob offered to test the bridge as it starts working and code up demo applications to show off MaidSafe capabilities in the browser.
That is pretty much all I remember, I will let the others chime in for important stuff I might have missed.
