MC Software - Alpha Release

Here's a link to a video showing the prototype so far: https://www.loom.com/share/32096bc1623c4636898a8f0c09eab42c

The focus of this first stage has been to:
1) Get the basic user and admin account features in place (signup, login, account management, logging, etc.)
2) Setup a basic structure for creating and searching for business listings

The demo site is online here:
https://alpha.ic3.dev/

The link above defaults to the login page.

Feel free to create a new account, or use one of these 5 test accounts that are already in the database:
user = [email protected] (or jdoe2, jdoe3 ... up to jdoe5, all @dev.null)
pass = password (all lower case)

And if you want to see the admin side, here's the login:
https://alpha.ic3.dev/admin/login
user = [email protected] or [email protected]
pass = password

There are 200 businesses made up of dummy data in the database already.

This is running on a basic digitalocean.com server based in London, so it should be pretty snappy response times for all of you in the UK. It is not a production system, so it might crash randomly and be down when you try to access it. If it is, ping me and I will restart it.

Feel free to drop me any feedback, comments, suggestions, etc. here in this thread.

Work In Progress
- There is still work to be completed to enable "fuzzy matching" of the search parameters. Right now matches will only be returned if they are exact (e.g., no typos, and typing "restaurants" will not match "restaurant"). This work should be completed by the end of this week however.

Hi Geoff, I've tried the joes' and the admin they don't seem to work at the moment, so I've done a 'genuine' one for my business. Interface is nice and clean. I'll look a bit more in a while. I'm involved in a community oriented IoT thing at the moment, but I suspect that some of the work may feed into network monitoring: http://212.159.149.210/d/_s8miDSWk/experimental-house-measurements?orgId=1&refresh=5m&from=1563931306235&to=1563952906235 user 'garden', password 'garden'. This was something I wanted to do more fully with my own software (monitor transaction volume, detect pooling etc.) but I never got around to it.

Hi Hugh, make sure you are on the correct login page for users/admins. The jdoes go to /login whereas the admins go to admin/login. It's easy to mistake the two because the pages almost look the same.
Grafana is awesome. You can do a lot with it.

Thanks, starting the 'busy' bit of the weekend now, but will have another go soon.

Thanks Geoff! This is impressive progress.

I've taken the liberty of pasting here some excerpts from an email thread:
(from Geoff)Hi Matthew,
Thanks a lot for your feedback! Please see my replies inline:
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Wednesday, June 12, 2019 9:03 AM, Matthew Slater [email protected] wrote:

Great Job Geoff!

As user:

shouldn't the offers & wants tags make suggestions based on existing tags?

Yes, this is still on the to do list.

the tags allow inconsistent capitalisation.

Capitalization is enforced two different ways:

Users - No matter what a user types, it is converted to lower case. Spaces become dashes, and all other characters are stripped. So if I type " .. CHInese ResTAUrAnT!! !! !! " it becomes "chinese-restaurant". You can type whatever you want when creating or updating the Offers/Wants in your account, but they get converted consistently.

Admins - They can type anything, and I left it free form in case they want to capitalize the admin tags. I'm fine to apply the same conversion as above; feedback from Oli, Dave & Dil are welcome on this point.

I assume you were referring to the admin tags above, but let me know if you saw something else that seemed inconsistent.

I'm surprise that a global search for "food" turns up nothing.

That's because I have not seeded the database with many tags. This is something the app admins will need to do, though we could come up with a suggested list of starter tags. Let me know if you have any ideas here already.

In the search results I clicked on Skipfire https://alpha1.ic3.dev/businesses/5cffcefbd7c8d4c7f685950b
 - there's a broken link to spiegel.de on that page.

That's because the test data we seeded did not have a fully qualified URL (with https://...). I'll check to make sure we are enforcing fully qualified URLs when the user signs up or modifies the website address.

On the business details page, the green tags aren't clickable

This was done on purpose. I am happy to make the links clickable here too. Oli/Dave/Dil, let me know if you agree once you have reviewed the site.

As admin:

When I search by business, I  got confused because the results appeared below the fold

Yeah, this is dependent on screen size, but I see the issue. I'll see about adding an anchor tag that pushes the results to the top of the screen when the page reloads with the data.

I don't see the point in being able to add tags if they don't show up as hints when the user is adding them.

See above. This will be added shortly.

Geoff do have a look at this before you start coding the accounting.
http://matslats.net/mutual-credit-architecture-3

Ah, nice. OK. I'll review it thoroughly and come back with any questions/comments before I design the transactions module.

Cheers,
G

Fuzzy matching is now working. Login as an admin and try searching for "vin" and "vindur" to see results, with the view toward trying to find the company "vinder". "vin" is a wildcard match, while "vindur" is a fuzzy match. Using both gives flexibility for both trying to find a match based on a partial name or a misspelling.
We'll incorporate Matt's feedback next week and then start working on matching notifications, as requested by Oli.

Thanks, some quick questions:
1. Are some non-tech users (preferably Co-Op folks) currently feeding back on this?
2. Is this going to be released at some stage with an open-source licence?
3. Is some thought being (may be too early) to federation via API, search and payment?
4. Sorry, this is may be somewhere, is there a document describing base layers, database used etc. etc.?
My own view of a credit commons isn't monolithic, it's more a 'federated constellation' of (fairly) small semi-autonomous bits, hence some of questions.

Hi Hugh,

1. Yes. I've already had some feedback from Oli, Dil and Dave.
2. Yes.
3. Yes, some preliminary thought is already being given to APIs/federation. It's early days though, but it is always being considered.
4. Not yet. We're using the Go language with Mongo database and Elasticsearch. We'll document this later once we have something more polished.
5. I agree with your point about the credit commons not being monolithic. This is prototype software being built specifically for OCN. The aim here is to learn from it and eventually rebuild something that can be federated (i.e., multiple mutual credit exchanges running the software and being able to interoperate with each other, or at least with the ones they choose). We're taking small steps in the beginning here.

Cheers,
G

Hi Geoff, Thanks, reassuring, I'm catching up to some extent, apologies for probably recovering ground that may have been covered. I've just been in SW France where there are a couple of SELs (LETs basically) that I know, they are tiny and don't even use spreadsheets, so they'd probably want to evolve to something really simple. So, if they had some decent APIs, they could probably participate in a network, if they had to implement something complex, no chance.