#i can remember TCR structure

[tchaikovskym]

Due to having some social contact outside work and school settings, my schedule has fallen apart and I don't know how I'll do

[cryptswahili]

Q1 2019 Update

At Colony, we use the OKR method for setting quarterly goals and keeping our distributed team of 20 in sync and accountable. Below is our quarterly report on 2018 and a look ahead at Q1 2019.

Touché, Q4

These updates are written to provide a clear and honest reflection of the work that we do. Our update post has taken longer to write (it’s well into February) because this time ‘round, we’ve got a lot to reflect on.  

Let’s start with the big, obvious thing: If you saw us at DevCon in Prague this year, you might have heard us say something along the lines of *“we’re working hard with a target to release before the end of the year.*

We didn’t hit that goal. So it goes*.

It's ok to fail, but only if we learn something from it. And we’ve learned quite a few things from missing our aggressive release target.

*For avoidance of doubt: Colony has not pulled a Metroid Prime 4 -- we’re not starting again from scratch or anything like that; bulding a dapp that is decentralized, distributed, and trustless end-to-end is just harder than we initially expected. The devops groundhog saw her shadow, and it’ll be at least 6 more weeks of development.  

Learning #1: The off-chain world is more important than we previously estimated.

Dapps are hard. Really hard. One of the big challenges we took on with our dApp is “full” decentralization. That means no compromises. Everything in our stack, from UI components down to smart contracts must, in principle, function without relying on any component or service that’s hosted, owned, or otherwise ‘centralized’.

Not a lot of people realize what a big deal this is.

With smart contracts, in some senses we get decentralization for free. All the ‘consensus-relevant’ stuff runs on the EVM, which is as secure and decentralized as the blockchain it lives inside. Creating a secure, efficient system of smart contracts is certainly not a trivial task, but it’s only part of the whole.

There is an entire world of work to be done off the chain in the form of basic interfaces for blockchain interaction and integrations -- Robust and secure smart contracts are necessary for the success of any Ethereum project, but they are not sufficient.

Ultimately, whatever benefits a smart contract brings a user will be mediated by that user’s ability to access and manipulate the smart contracts. Dapps are meant to bridge a smart contract and a human, but right now that divide is still large.

The Ethereum developer community has been at it for a while, and there are so many brilliant efforts toward what is largely a unified goal: Mainstream adoption and acceptance by real users. But there’s still a lot of work to be done to close that gap.

UX/UI, a distributed user database, multi-signature transaction workflows -- there are a number of very fundamental interactions *off-chain* that are largely un-charted territory.  If a user’s data is out there on the decentralized web (IPFS), how do we make sure it remains available and secure for that user? How do we onboard new users that might not have any Ether or be “hip to the blockchain”?

These are some of the major hurdles that we confronted last quarter, and it resulted in a lot of careful and deliberate designing, on both back and front ends. Because, as we said, this is all un-charted territory. No one has built a dapp to this standard before, and these things take time.

Learning #2: Secure the Network

Our network team might be mad at me for seemingly representing the smart contract work as less important than the Dapp stuff. Quite the contrary!

We strive to set the bar for robust testing and best-practices when it comes to our deepest layer. The colonyNetwork contracts comprise over 6000 lines of well-tested solidity (395 tests, to be exact, with over 90% code coverage)

Shameles plug: If you’re a solidity developer looking to hack on some advanced contracts, we are still accepting submissions! Secure the Network and make some $DAI in the process </shamelessplug>

Last quarter we launched our Bug Bounty Program, and have to-date paid out $3600 in bounties to open-source contributors who submitted valid issues.

There were bugs alright, and we are continuing to optimize and improve the Colony Network with your help.

Learning #3: Research is important

Although it’s crucial sometimes to focus exclusively on the here and now challenges, we put a high value on theory and more forward-looking work. While we have made steady progress on the dapp, one of our big accomplishments last quarter was the creation of a new crypto-economic primitive! Eat your heart out, TCRs and Bonding Curves.

In London this winter, a few members of the Colony research team convened for a ‘research sprint’ to discuss possible mechanisms for perpetual self-improvement of the Meta-Colony.

What resulted from that week was pretty nifty pattern we call BudgetBox

https://blog.colony.io/introducing-budgetbox/

TL;DR -- BudgetBox is a proposed mechanism for allocating a budget in a decentralized context. Instead of creating a ranking or other arbitrary method of deciding “this much money goes to this recipient”, budgetbox builds a budget directly from a large set of pairwise preferences (“I think this initiative is better than that one”).

@joincolony Budgetbox is one of the most creative governance proposals I've seen. It replicates a sports championship, where instead of votes each proposal get many 1:1 comparisons and then they move up or down in their "league" depending on how they fare.https://t.co/12w7vAcHHl

— alex van de sande (@avsa) January 18, 2019

We’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on the paper, and we welcome anyone who wants to discuss or experiment with our solidity implementation to reach out to krono@colony.io .

En Guarde, Q1

As we have said many times: dapps are hard. This quarter, we’re working on overcoming a few major challenges that need to be solved before the colony reference client meets our exceptionally high standards.

UX and onboarding

One major piece of work we’ve been fixated on is user onboarding and UX.

We want interacting with our smart contracts to be simple. Dead. Simple. That’s a huge ask considering that users will need to perform multiple transactions on-chain as they interact with Colony. So we came up with a concept we call the ‘gas station’ for grouped and multisig transactions.

The Colony gas station is a way of displaying all the need-to-know information about your dapp interactions that are bound for the blockchain in a human-readable context, and more importantly making the multi-signature transaction workflow smooth and simple. Rather than popping up and asking you to sign and broadcast transactions as they happen, the gas station saves all your interactions as unbroadcasted ‘pending’ transactions, ready to be signed and committed to the public record.

All transactions ready to be signed and sent to the blockchain are grouped together by category, so that they can be sent at once or queued for later. Instead of seeing a contract address, you’ll get a descriptive title of what you’re doing, how much the transaction will cost, and whether or not that transaction requires another’s signature to be finalized.

TL;DR: Colony’s gas station makes using Ethereum multi-sig transactions easier to understand, and reasonable for normal people.

The gas station concept screen

ENS support

Colony is made for people (although robots are welcome, too). People have a hard time remembering phone numbers, let alone long strings of hexidecimal.

Well good news, everyone! Through the magic of ENS sub-domains, your Colony will, at launch, be able to claim a nice, friendly human-readable name *without* needing to go through all that commit/reveal hubbub associated with top-level domains.

When you create a colony with the dapp, you will have the option to register `mycoolcolony.joincolony.eth` -- and it’ll just work. If you don’t want the .joincolony.eth TLD, you can also configure your own ENS domain to work with a newly created colony.  

Pinion and OrbitDB

Every dapp needs to have some kinda database, because there’s a lot of important stuff that can’t be put on-chain.  For example, profile pictures, comments associated with tasks, and other meta-data such as that is necessary for a good user experience, but totally impractical (and expensive) to put on chain. That would be crazy. Most dapps today are a kind of centralized/decentralized hybrid, where this meta-data is hosted on a server, but the *real* important “decentralized” center is, of course, on Ethereum.

That’s not good enough for us. Colony needs to be **truly decentralized**, meaning that even that meta-data should not depend on a central server or data store. It’s gotta live on a distributed network like IPFS. In the case of the Colony dapp, that system is built on top of (or forked from, to be more accurate) the OrbitDB project. This allows us to keep more complex data associated with a single Ethereum account on IPFS, as a structured database instead of an isolated file.  

IPFS, however, by virtue of being a decentralized and distributed system, has some of its own quirks, which we needed to solve. For example, when some meta-data is put up on IPFS, it’ll only stay on a particular node for a finite time if it’s not requested by someone else on the network. When a user uploads a profile picture to the dapp, we want that picture to be *always* available, no matter how long the user waits.

Pinion solves this problem, by providing a ‘pinning service’, and making sure that at least one node on IPFS is up an serving the data that needs to be available, effectively ‘pinning’ it to the network, available for all users at all times. We'll be open-sourcing pinion when we feel it's polished enough for the prime-time.

Multi-signature transactions

You may have read Elena’s parameterized transaction reviews article, which was a deep dive into the solidity implementation of Colony’s multi-sig pattern.

The complete end-to-end lifecycle of a multi-sig transaction involves a lot of off-chain helper machinery, which brings the signed transaction from one user to another. The multi-sig transaction workflow touches almost every aspect of the Colony stack.  

There’s a lot going on here -- too much to fit into this post, but expect a full-blown technical post that dives into an end-to-end multisig transaction, and how it plays out, both on-chain and from the perspective of a user.

Integrate Colony into your App

Developer experience matters. One thing we’ve worked on already is making integrations with Colony as simple as possible for dapp developers and projects that want to use Colony for their governance layer.

The ColonyJS docs have been massively improved, and now detail exactly how to bring in all Colony methods to your application for simple integration.

We’ve added a new payments function to the colonyNetwork contracts. This is to enable a Colony to make payments without requiring the signature of the person getting paid. This might be useful for cases in which you want to create incentives or rewards that happen after the work has taken place.

Finally, the colonyStarter has also been revamped and improved. If you’re wondering how to integrate colony into a JS or react-based front end, you can see tons of examples within the colony-starter-basic and colony-starter-react packages. Just yarn and go!

Meet us in person!

ETHCC / ETHParis -- Our own Daniel Kronovet will be giving a talk on budgetbox at EthCC, and more than a few team members will be attending both ETHCC and ETHParis. Magnifique!

RadicalxChange -- And right after Paris, a few (or maybe just one) Coloneer will be headed to Detroit to present BudgetBox.

-

Colony builds tools for organizing and incentivizing teams, projects, and communities.

Join the discussion on Discourse, follow us on Twitter, sign up for (occasional) email updates, or if you’re feeling old-skool, drop us an email.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

[rolandfontana]

Is the Warrior Cop a Myth?

 Have U.S. police become a militarized force? A 2017 analysis by the Washington Post found that police departments which invested in more military hardware were associated with more civilians killed each year by police.

News photos of demonstrators facing police in military vehicles, or the aggressive behavior of SWAT teams, have buttressed fears that the civilian character of law enforcement has been eclipsed by a “warrior” mindset.

George C. Klein, author of the recently published book, The Militarization of the Police?: Ideology versus Reality, wants to turn that debate in a different direction. A former part-time Chicago police officer, and former consultant to the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy, Klein argues that American police are often forced into roles they were never trained for.

George Klein

In a recent conversation with The Crime Report, Klein, who is also a professor emeritus at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Ill., discussed how the paramilitary structure that characterizes modern American policing often leads to misperceptions about “warrior cops.” But he also conceded that using police as instruments of now-controversial government policies such as the war on drugs has undermined their legitimacy in many U.S. communities.

The transcript of this conversation has been condensed and slightly edited for clarity.

The Crime Report: Is police militarization a valid concern today?

George Klein: The “optics” (supporting the perception of militarization) are really striking. You can make a good story about it and get lots of photos. If you look at the videos and photos of Ferguson you see officers with guns, and SWAT officers, leading to politicians, and some journalists calling it a “war zone.” It’s not. People aren’t getting killed, there are no tanks; shells aren’t exploding. It’s a riot.

There’s also a political aspect: [When such riots occur, it usually means] the government has lost control of the situation. But when police step in, it raises questions about law enforcement legitimacy. In a lot of minority communities, police don’t have legitimacy as it is. That’s because of how they acted in the past and because of the war on drugs. One of the things people don’t appreciate is that law enforcement is selective. If you look at how law enforcement works in the suburbs, it’s more restrained. Because that’s how you’re supposed to act with people who have political power. In poor neighborhoods, where there’s high crime and some concern about officer safety, the officers are less constrained among those who don’t have political power.

TCR: So what realities are being lost in the debate over the militarization and violence of policing?

GK: Officers are jacks of all trades. No matter what the call, a lost kid, a disturbed individual, police handle all sorts of calls, and the vast majority are nonviolent. The actual use of force or the threat of use of force is minimal. Police are problem-solvers. And while most people don’t appreciate this, police departments are the only government agencies that are open 24 hours a day, and will respond. Fire departments are available, but they arrive, they say “did you have a heart attack?”, and, if not, they’re gone.

Now, if things get out of hand, which is very rare, you call other patrol officers; if things get out of hand further you call more patrol officers; and if things become a catastrophe, then SWAT arrives. In Ferguson, one of the points worth noting is that the officers were not trained in riot control; same for Baltimore. The only ones who were trained were SWAT, which had to take over where it really wasn’t necessary or appropriate. In a riot situation, you don’t need officers pointing guns. You need a line of officers, you say “no further,” and if they keep coming you throw tear gas.

Irrespective of what’s portrayed on TV, officers are reluctant to use their weapons. 

The only officers who know how to use tear gas are SWAT officers. Average patrol officers never use that sort of thing. Some 90-plus percent of patrol officers have a pistol. And liability is a real concern of police chiefs and also police officers. When you fire that bullet, it’s ballistic. It goes where it wants to go. If you shoot and miss a person, the bullet can travel a mile or more, go through a wall, and hit a kid. So, irrespective of what’s portrayed on TV, officers are reluctant to use their weapons. Seventy percent of officers involved in shootings retire early. They’re traumatized. They’re not soldiers. This notion that cops are gun guys and use force all the time is just not true.

A point I make in the book is that policemen are social workers with guns. They mostly try to solve people’s problems that can’t be solved any other way. It’s band-aid work. A phrase I used to hear very often when I was a cop was “how do we solve this problem tonight?” You’re not gonna solve this family disturbance; you’re not going to solve this kid who’s run away from home repeatedly. How do we solve the problem in the next 20 minutes? Sergeants say all the time that there are calls waiting, all human problems need to be solved in 20 minutes. That’s how police operate.

TCR: How does the political narrative of a war on drugs contribute to the problem?

 GK: That narrative wasn’t created by the police. The police didn’t create the war on drugs, politicians did. And I don’t mean that in a negative sense. Politicians represent society and most of society doesn’t want drugs. The police are a blunt instrument. They are a paramilitary organization. Officers take orders. If the orders are to go arrest drug dealers, then they go arrest drug dealers. A problem with this is that the typical drug user is a 32-year- old white male living in the suburbs. Those people don’t get arrested. The police aren’t involved with or interested in them.

But in the street, drug suppression becomes a major focus because it represents disorder; and disorder is something that police are really concerned about. There was an operation called Pressure Point, which targeted open-air drug markets in New York City. In that operation, police began to arrest the people going there to buy, as well as the dealers. People were very pleased; the captain in charge was promoted. It was considered a great success. But drug dealing didn’t stop. If you drive drug dealers out of one neighborhood, they’ll just go to another neighborhood.

 TCR: A lot of advertising for hiring in police departments can over-emphasize the action side of the job. Should there be a change in how police departments advertise to better emphasize the current popularized need for guardians, not warriors?

 GK: Well, because of the recession, the number of officers [joining police ranks] fell by a significant percentage. And young people today, the video game kids, like action. Video action. So the way the departments try to recruit young people, remember these are 19- 25-year-olds, is through these “slick videos.”

In Illinois (a few years ago), the Republican governor and the Democratic state legislature couldn’t come to a budget for two years and, as a result, the state police budget, and the number of officers, fell dramatically. So, they put out a slick video. If you can go become a sales associate full time at Best Buy or go become a cop, what are you going to take? If you’re going to make roughly the same money, why put your life in danger? I think a lot of people feel that way. There was a tradition of people becoming cops after their fathers and grandfathers; it was, in effect, their company. Well, today that’s gone. So, you’ve got recruitment problems, young people don’t want to be cops, and police are desperate. It’s difficult.

 TCR: When considering de-escalation, does American policing have more to learn from police in other parts of the world?

GK: [Things are a little different here because of how people react to] the duality of police roles. You have authority—and you are authority. There’s no way to avoid that, and people resent that because you’re telling them what to do. When we were in training, we were told your job is to take control of the situation, which is often chaotic when you get there, and once you take control then you can do other things.

I was having a conversation with someone and I mentioned that I wanted to go do research in Scotland where police don’t use guns and he looked at me incredulously and said do you think that police in America shouldn’t carry guns? I said of course not. When I was in uniform I would never go anywhere without my gun and my vest. Even when they’d call me in on a Friday to go fingerprint kids in a grammar school, I wore my full uniform. I wore my vest, and I carried my gun.

A phrase that police say is “you never know.” You never know what situation may occur. And 99 percent of the time nothing occurs, but you’ve gotta be prepared. Guns are prevalent in America, and so you have to be prepared to have a gun and use it if necessary.

 TCR: How do you fight what seems to be the anti-policing rhetoric of some media and protest groups and create, instead, more empathy for what is truly a very difficult and dangerous job?

GK: People think SWAT teams and what they saw in Ferguson are regular police work. But if the media wants to make a fair portrayal, then it needs to look at the mundane things that police do: intervening in family disturbances, with the mentally ill, with alcoholics in the street. That’s what you need to look at if you want a fair and balanced view of police work.

If the media wants to make a fair portrayal then it needs to look at the mundane things that police do.

But, of course, people don’t want to look at that sort of thing. When I first began doing my police research, reporters would come in to the department I was riding with. I’d spend a whole summer riding with them to understand real police work.

A reporter would come in from the local action work and say I have three hours, show me police work. And they’d zoom around and make traffic stops and put people against the wall and they’d put on a show. The media would be happy, police would get rid of those people, and that would be a two-minute news report with 30 seconds of video. That’s not real police work.

TCR: Are police departments wearing too many hats?

GK: One of the topics that everybody in criminal justice is aware of is the breakdown of the mental health system. I began doing my research in the 1960s and 1970s when everyone was aware of the horrors of the state hospital. Crowded wards with 150 people in one room with beds six inches apart. It was terrible. But the civil liberties perspective has gone to the extreme. You can’t commit anybody anymore. Everybody used to get committed. You’d have 40-50 guys committed daily in the mental health court. Now the mental health system is totally different.

The police have an impossible task. Police in Ferguson were really terrible before the riots. But issues like segregation or housing discrimination are historic social problems that police can’t solve. Take truancy. Why is truancy part of the criminal justice system? It really doesn’t make any sense [for police and courts to be involved]. It’s social, it’s personal, it’s psychological. But we don’t have any other way to deal with it, so that’s where it winds up. Same for mental health.

We don’t know what to do with these people, and so the police end up dealing with them, the courts end up dealing with them, the criminal justice system ends up dealing with them, and it’s just not appropriate. They need social services, mental health services, and they just don’t get them.

TCR: Is that a reflection of how our society sees these problems?

GK: We really don’t take care of people’s problems very much. And that goes back to a larger issue about what American society’s about. It’s about production. Making money. Being Number One. I used to talk to my students about this, and it’s kind of ridiculous, but I’d say, “Who wants to grow up and be a loser?” Nobody wants to grow up and be a loser; everyone wants to grow up and be a winner. Donald Trump is an aberration, but he really is simply an extension, to the extreme, of the entrepreneurial, making-money kind of guy in America. That’s who we celebrate.

We don’t really care about people who fall between the cracks. And, therefore, the kinds of social services that are needed aren’t available to a lot of people. Those are the kinds of things that get cut a lot or are really never funded adequately. And when it comes to criminal justice, we don’t really care about these people.

Other countries, especially European countries, try rehabilitation and dealing with social problems in a way that we don’t. That’s because we’re an extremely individualistic, entrepreneurial country, and either you make it or you don’t. If you don’t make it, we don’t really care that much.

Isidoro Rodriguez is a contributing writer to The Crime Report on policing issues. He welcomes comments from readers.

Is the Warrior Cop a Myth? syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/