Masterminds,

In my first post on the 5th of August when I took over the role of Chairman, I set out three immediate priorities for the MSC Foundation.

1. Establish a Clear Road Map: http://goo.gl/rl5Zvp

2. Open Communications: http://blog.mastercoin.org/2014/08/06/opening-up-communication-and-amas-starting-today/

3. Streamlining of spending and partnerships.

On each of these topics I’d like to offer a quick update and invite the community to continue actively engaging as they have done so the last few weeks on how to improve the MSC Protocol, the Foundation, our community, and the open source software.

Road Map:

Firstly on the Road Map, I want to thank everyone for the helpful comments and input on the direction of the Foundation and its priorities. You can find the most updated version of the Foundation’s Road Map at: http://goo.gl/rl5Zvp

As for the milestones for the August and September period I’m happy to report the team has completed 10 out of the 17 items on the list and the others are in progress. Completed items include; partnering with industry expert on best practices for order book of decentralized exchange, engaging our best developers and increasing the bandwidth of the MasterCore team with more testers, announcing points of contact for MasterCore, OmniWallet, and so forth.

Open Communication:

Secondly, on “Open Communications” in addition to making regular posts on the blog, being available on Reddit, and the forums, Shannon Code is working to weave together all the different channels of the MSC community so that users can see updates on progress, developer discussion, and so forth easily without having to log into a proprietary program such as Skype and find a invite based chat room. http://blog.mastercoin.org/2014/08/06/opening-up-communication-and-amas-starting-today/

Shannon will be posting soon about his efforts on this front to open up all of the communications.

Streamlining Spending and Partnering:

Thirdly, on Spending I’ve been reaching out to the community to get input on how to improve the Role Based Bounty and general bounty system that has been in place since the beginning of the Foundation’s work. One point of consensus is to move from a generalized bounty system which is currently paid on a monthly basis, to that of a deliverable based bounty system, where the milestones are clearly defined, prioritized, and set at the beginning of each month and paid out at the end of each month. This way the priorities of the community for the development of the MSC open source software clients will come first in focusing contributing developers time and energy.

As for “Partnering”, serious new projects with the potential of engaging new demographics and users have announced they will be developing on top of the MSC platform including the recent post about the Merchant Coin project.

Conclusion:

All in all, I believe we have the right team members working with the Foundation to encourage the development of the MSC protocol and make its open source clients the standard for reliability for major projects who have large user bases and will transact significant value on top of the protocol. I’ll continue doing everything in my power to encourage the continued development of an engaged and authentic community of users and developers extending the capabilities of the bitcoin blockchain to include smart property, decentralized exchange and much more.

Sincerely,

David A. Johnston

Chairman of the MSC Board

David (at) Mastercoin.org