Project Discovery

Finding and sharing projects with peers

While %fund offers many standard affordances of centralized crowdfunding platforms (comments with your contributions, refunds for non-completed work, etc), the decentralized nature of the system means that discovery of project campaigns occurs from your peers, not from a centralized repository controlled by ~tocwex.syndicate.

The basic mechanic for discovering projects is to have one of your %pals share it with you. Or of course for you to share it with your %pals.

Sharing projects as a project worker

If you are the project worker, the visibility of the project is up to you. When a project is first released, by sending a service request to your desired trusted oracle, it's visibility set as "unlisted". In this state, your trusted oracle can view it on their urbit from within %fund, and you can share the URL to any other viewers you may want to see or contribute to the project. Someone with the URL can view, login to (using eAuth), and follow your project's funding campaign, but it will not be easily gossiped across the network.

If you want it to be discoverable throughout the Urbit Network, by other users of %fund, you must "publicize" it. To do that, go to the project page and search for the "eye" icon in the action bar (next to the big "Contribute" button). Click the eye, read the confirmation message and press "publicize".

The "Publicize" button and confrimation in the action bar

This action does two things:

1. It shares the project to all of your %pals so it will show up in the "Discover" tab of their %fund application.

2. It adds the project to your profile, indicating to any other ships that come across the project that you are ok with it being re-publicized to their %pals.

Note, this doesn't automagically propogate your project across the entire network. Why? Because the best way to crowdfund is through the implied recommendations and explicit word-of-mouth of your community. Want your campaign to get more visibility? Talk to your %pals. Ask them what they think. Ask them to fund your project. And of course ask them to re-publicize it—if they think it is deserving of the honor.

Re-publicizing a project you follow

While the project worker may be the primary party responsible for publicizing their project, they aren't the only ones that can share opportunities across the network. If a project worker has "publicized" their campaign, any follower of the project can re-publicize it to the follower's respective set of %pals. If a project you are following (either as a viewer, funder, or oracle) has been publicized, you will find the "eye" icon in the action bar; after clicking you will get the chance to confirm you want to to share.

The %pals dependency

This project discovery feature relies on the %pals application in order to function. If you onboarded via tocwexsyndicate.com you already have %pals and do not need to take additional action. If some some reason you do not have %pals, it can be downloaded from ~paldev. To install from the dojo, just run:

|install ~paldev %pals

In the event you have connectivity issues with ~paldev, the original distributor of the application, we maintain a distribution version on ~tocwex that mirrors that of ~paldev. Just swap the Urbit IDs in the command and re-run it.