I received feedback on becoming more transparent about the motivations behind certain decisions, particularly when it comes to Stimbus. Often it’s not transparency that’s the issue, we’re incredibly transparent, but it is more the announcement/broadcasting/dissemination of the information that we struggle with.
Generally speaking when there is a decision to be made there is a discussion with key stakeholders, but, those stakeholders should be informing latecomers. However if you aren’t a stakeholder, then it’s your responsibility to seek out the information to satiate your curiosity.
For Stimbus specifically, @hester has been doing a fantastic job of keeping notes on Stimbus since mid-May including the Why, having that said, I can appreciate bulletpoints not providing the whole context.
Earlier in history, the feedback I received was that “we have too many projects and not enough focus”.
It’s easy to not see the composition of these projects as an ecosystem. Under this perspective you could take Status App, Keycard, Embark, Vac and Nimbus at face value, and you would be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that these “don’t fit into Status’ core competencies”.
The overarching motivation here is to make concrete the composition of the Status ecosystem projects. To create more focus, unity and collaboration between formerly distinct teams, as well as make the team budget justifications easier.
Keycard, Embark, Nimbus and Core act somewhat independently. After the market crash we made the priority of ensuring we’re focused on building out the SNT utilities as fast as possible and we also went on a discovery process on ways each of the projects will sustain at least their teams and deliver bottom-line value to the organisation.
Keycard was by far the easiest of the 3 to deal with, very little drama (for which I’m very grateful), built out a VISA replacement with very little oversight and and now deploying that system by implementing Status Pay, a powerful and exciting contribution to SNT uility. The only major issue that I’ve been aware of has been a resourcing issue in terms of integrating Keycard into the application.
Embark, the long story short is we were unable to identify a revenue model to sustain Embark, at the same time we had the resourcing issue of maintaining a desktop client in Core. My hope was to fold Embark into Core so I can justify the team budget, increase collaboration and get a desktop implementation of Status. That certainly has been more dramatic than I expected. I hope that there is more transparency, communication, better leadership and re-establishing trust from both sides.
Then there is Nimbus, the team is the most isolated and is largely subsidized by Ethereum. Stellar team focused on shipping. Like all teams they have had some focus and code quality issues, both of which have been improving dramatically lately. Nimbus can really use a goal, to focus on a real-world production use case. To make that project real and bring the mentality up to a level of focusing on production-quality code. How do we do that? By integrating Nimbus into Status.
So why Stimbus?
Stimbus forces alignment across the organisation. Stimbus is the focal point in where the 3 teams come together, it aligns Mobile, Desktop and Nimbus. At the same time it is opportunity to gradually replace status-go which is somewhat of a franken ‘library’ filled with historical baggage.
Stimbus is the last piece of the socio-technical changes to have everyone in the organisation aligned.
Once we get more communication, collaboration and alignment between the projects, it’s easier to justify the budgets of each team because they are contributing to Status directly.
The organisation will be aligned, focused on delivering on what we’ve always been working on, a great superapp that respects the users liberty and privacy.