Core Idea

The user signs in using their Github account and activates their Repo. Once activated, the repo becomes a Project and is assigned to one of Self’s chatbot Project Managers. The PM will start taking care of it automatically: assign/unassign Issues, make payments, open/close Issues based on TODOs, listen to commands etc.

However, before the chatbot PM can actually do anything valuable, the Project needs to have some Contributors. After activating the Repo, the user must register some Contracts (a Contract is the bond between a Project and a Contributor).

Concepts

User, Contributors
Repo, Project
Task
Invoices
Payout Methods

User, Contributors

A User is usually someone who activated one or more of their repos on Self XDSD. The Project Owner, if you wish.

A Contributor is a Github user who has a Contract with the Project. A Contributor may have multiple contracts with the same Project (one contract with the DEV role, another one with the ARCH role etc).

Of course, a person can be both a User and a Contributor – that is, you can have your own repos managed by Self and also work as a Contributor in other people’s projects.

Repo, Project

We call a Repo any Github repository owned by the authenticated user, which is not yet managed by Self.

A Repo which has been activated (it is now managed by Self), is called a Project. This is a 1:1 relationship, there can be only one Project for any Github Repo.

Task

A Task is the Self entity representing a Github Issue or PR which is managed by the PM. The basic life-cycle of an Issue/PR is the following:

Issue/PR is opened;
PM takes it into scope (registers a Task for it) automatically;
PM assigns it to a Contributor;
Contributor works on it and finally closes it;
PM adds the Task to the Contributor’s active Invoice and takes it out of scope.

Any Issue or PR will automatically become a Task. If, for any reason, you don’t want it to be a task, you can just say deregister and the PM will remove it from scope (no payments will be made and the PM will charge no commission). Also, when opening a new Issue or PR you can label it no-task and the PM will not register it as a Task at all.

Invoices

Tasks finished and closed by a Contributor are added to the Contributor’s active Invoice. The active Invoice is the latest, unpaid Invoice.

Invoices are automatically paid out regularly. Using the Project’s active Wallet.

Wallets

Each Project can have a number of wallets attached, but only one of them can be active – the one Self uses to make payments.

Each Project starts with a Fake Wallet attached to it: as long as this fake wallet is active, all the payments (including Self’s commission) are fictive.

The user can register a Real Wallet and can specify a cash limit that Self is allowed to take from it. Real wallets are implemented using Stripe.

Payout Methods

Once a Project has a real wallet, the Contributors must create a Payout Method in order to be paid. Payout methods are also implemented via Stripe.

If the project has no real wallet, Contributors do not need to do anything, since the payments are fictive.