Welcome to the second edition of our monthly newsletter, where we inform you about what is happening at Horizon State.
The last month already seems a blur as the time has flown by. Demand for Horizon State’s product suite has seen our team members busy engaging potential and existing clients, and amongst that our work is increasingly being recognised as a trailblazer in the technology industry. Last week members of our team attended the Australian Digital Commerce Association’s event in Sydney for our nomination for the Best Government Blockchain Project in 2019, and the New Zealand team put on their Sunday best for the Wellington Gold Awards — an event that acknowledges the top businesses and projects making a difference in the local community.
Although we didn’t walk away as the winner, it was an honour for Horizon State to be represented at both of these prestigious events against teams that have been in operation for much longer, and we look forward to vying for the top honours again next year as a more mature and developed project. Until then, we will keep our trophy cabinet glistening. We’ve also been busy running The Opportunities Party Board election which come to a close this week and gearing up for their next AGM vote in a month. Our development team has written a great deal of code this month, and we’ve signed our first mayoral candidate for their upcoming campaign in a local general election in New Zealand.
Development update
It has been a couple of months since we provided an in-depth development update because our team has been focusing on getting the code written and product shipped.
In our last update, we covered rebuilding the front and backend of our authentication service, the development of the i18n (the “internationalisation” of the product), as well as updating all of our development dependencies so that our codebase could run as smoothly as possible without any vulnerabilities. Some further work has gone into the authentication side of things at our customer’s request — so we are delighted that everything we have built thus far can be repurposed in some way, shape or form, while the API changes ensure that all of our features are easily configurable.
Another customer request saw our developers busy spending this week building out a new type of question that allows users to pinpoint key places or areas on an embedded map and provide feedback on those specificseries of markers. We’ve integrated with the Google Maps API for this, so users can opt to use satellite or street view to answer this question type, and they can add as many comments or markers as they need. This is something we hadn’t planned on building into our system, but it is already clear that this feature will save our customers significant work and time when analysing the outputs of each community engagement and channeling citizen suggestions to the right area, people, council, or organisation.
Once this module is completed we will begin working on the integration with Stripe for donations and community projects, a feature that could be utilised by political parties. It is very similar to the implementation we did for MiVote India, but this time we will be using Stripe for our payment gateway and UI needs. Next we will be making the API and front end changes to allow for voting via proxy. This is something that we already do when we need to process hard copy ballots, but leaving this up to the end-users puts us ahead of many other electronic voting systems, making it great deal easier for the end-user as well as opening our system up for other types of decisions such as shareholder and body corporate votes.
We have also begun research into integrating with other public blockchains, and have shortlisted a number of well-known projects that could be added to our catalogue of current options. Giving our customers these additional choices opens more avenues for them to ensure that they can provide their clients provable transparency. We are also of the view it has the added benefit of making us “black swan” protected should one of the chains have issues in the future.
Once these items are complete, we will carry on with the development of the CMS/Turnkey solution, but at this stage, it is not preventing any customers from signing on with us.
July 2019 AMA with Nimo, Dan, Andy and Sam
Join us for our monthly AMA via Telegram where questions can be asked to the team. This kicks off at 12 noon Melbourne time. The team will also be answering pre-asked questions, so feel free to raise anything you may want to know prior to this kicking off. Keep an eye out on Reddit too following the AMA to view the questions and responses from this session. We look forward to seeing you all there!
Coming up this month we’ve got…
Some further news and media coverage, a variety of meetings with union representatives and councils in NZ and Australia, running our first Mayoral campaign as well as speaking with other with mayoral candidates from different councils and an article being published covering our token mechanics and token information next week. It’s going to be another busy one!
