This is an entry to the Project Lifecycle Contest, make sure to get your entries in as well.
ARCHON is a tribe on HIVE, one which I have since the beginning sensed some potential in. Today I would like to review a bit of the history (as I remember it) of the tribe and where it stands today and how we can evaluate the possibilities.
But first, we must consider what a 'tribe' token is, its a model of token (different to a security) that represents some sort of membership or 'stake' based equity, the token being the equity. Tribes are necessarily 'run' by a centralized team, making even the meaning of stake open to definition. We could say that 'tribes' are an experiment, and maybe they aren't even a good model. But we play with the model, and learn lessons, from many many 'failures' in the tribe space, and perhaps some successes as well.
Perhaps the most successful tribes on HIVE are LEO and Neoxian. One can only look at the vast difference in their models to see that "its complicated".
From the Creator of #upfundme
ARCHON story is different. upfundme had existed on steem, and instead of just porting everything over, @taskmanager had what I consider to be the brilliant idea of starting again on HIVE, implementing new changes to the variables as to learn from what saw not working up until that point, of the HIVE fork. Even then, certain things were clear and many tribes had experienced different failures.
upfundme tribe was based on the idea that you could 'fund' certain goals and through the act of 'journaling' the journey on blockchain, you were slowly working toward your goal. They could also tie into 'funding' through donation models with some other 'dapps' that existed at that time. I was a fan of the idea that 'everyone is funding something', so that basically upfundme was a 'generic' tribe.
But with the advent of ARCHON, we got even more explicit and made the mother of all generic tribes. ARCHON was to be a 'support tribe', and by staking ARCHON you could activate 'support' code for you community. @taskmanager coded many great features, like comment rewards and community governance. He coded a lot of cool stuff over many years.
"End of an era"
Recently, its been tough for everybody, but indie devs man, I swear that each new update serves to demotivate a lot of people as things really start to break. Nodes have been problematic, hive-engine especially, but also HIVE, as things get updated and calls get depricated. Its affecting more than just this tribe for sure.
With a full time job and a big family, taskmanager finally threw in the towel. Maybe he did bite off more than he could chew with also DVS and DHEDGE, but this is what coding is like, and if not having fun and trying new things what is the point?
That said, he offered to give up ARCHON, and I stepped up, knowing that there was still a group of wonderful, smallish communities of Shadow Hunters, Bird Watchers, Reflection Hunters and Feel Good ways for new users to participate in this platform. I want to support them. In fact, you can read about them here on ARCHON's weekly post. @seckorama and I both have 'posting authority' over the @archonapp account, but ideally we would get the keys.
In some ways, ARCHON is a very active tribe still.
"Handover" part 1?
I first got ownership of the ARCHON and ARCHONM tokens, and worked with @eonwarped to set up the tribe through hive-engine, which includes post/comment rewards and the front end site to see votes/rewards in ARCHON token terms.
I was emailed by @taskmanager, who gave me the @archon-gov keys. I have since changed them, and changed the recovery account. Any day now should be statute of limitations for recovery, though I don't expect anything of the sort.
I was also give two scripts, which seem used to run a cool little thing where to trigger the @archon-gov voting trail on your post, you give 5% beneficiary to @archon-gov. This hasn't been active in some time, and so the scripts would need to be updated, but I knew this when I asked for them. Thank you @taskmanager!
Of course I am still hoping for a part 2.
Archon-gov
With control of this account, we do have something to work with. ARCHON in fact was a tribe with a high number of real assets, and archon-gov is a big part of this. We have converted HBD into hive and power up, and we are working through the hive-engine wallet to turn most if not everything we can into either Hive Power or staked ARCHON token itself.
For now, to insure curation, archon-gov is following the @ecoinstats curation trail. I am open for other suggestions, fixing the script might be one idea. Should I publish the script?
Other assets
ARCHON tribe has many other assets, the next biggest is/was @archon-mining - this account 'backed' the ARCHONM mining tokens with over 9000 HP at one point and now, at least the HIVE Power of it, is being removed from the platform.
This is a tricky bit. And I would like to be clear, that even without HIVE Power, I would still like the @archon-mining account keys (and scripts) that used to run the mining payouts (both in ARCHON and in HIVE).
Taking this money might not be great optics, but I want to remind everyone involved that when you spend countless hours building something and never 'pay' yourself, you might be/feel entitled to some of them tokens, especially if you need the money. So obviously there was some error in incentive structure, but I actually think it can be healthy to shake it out here. We got archon-gov, we don't yet have archon-mining.
We also would like the @archonapp account, as mentioned. This account has 2455 HP, for now @seckorama and I can still post from this account. For completeness, the ideal case would also get the keys to @archon.pay account, but this is less important.
I would also like more scripts, especially the community comment rewards, which used proprietary archon pools. This is a feature that has been requested by @melinda010100 , and was very useful to give a use to staking ARCHON tokens. This is likely the first code I would target taking a run at if we had something that 'used to work', but with nothing to base it on it will probably be very difficult.
So far so good, but we hope to get another email or message from @taskmanager soon with more keys and more code. I want to say that I completely understand, take what you need and then please give us the different accounts when you are ready - you are still a valued member of ARCHON as well, you have some stake in the tribe, and we like what you have built. The whole is bigger than the sum of its parts, and we are still having fun and willing to take over running what you created.
To the wider community, please continue to engage, I am open to suggestions and together with @seckorama and @melinda010100, putting together a team of people to help the ARCHON community support tribe become all it can be.