Cards & Tokens - FAQ (extension)

I've been recently reached out by a very active Telos member that you know here in steemit as @sirknight, who represent a very cool community called SteemChurch.

He asked me some questions and I wanted to thank him publicly and answer everything in this post for all the readers, specially for the SteemChurch members!

Questions

1 - Can we start on design now? ... and if Yes, where is the best place to begin?

Yes! you can start creating those cards right now, meaning the content and art of every card using your favorite graphic tools, because we don't have yet a functional editor to compose the final card. However, what we do have is a functional prototype that can be used to show a preview of the cards that you and your community may create.

You can take a look at the Steemit OpenMic and Telos trading card sets at the current application demo website.

The first set of trading cards belongs to the Steemit OpenMic community and each card represents an audition for the great weekly content organized by @luzcypher !

For those cards I create a simple template for all cards to follow and then I create a unique card for each audition, using the youtube video's preview, artist and song names.

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The second set of cards where used on the Telos reward program in order to help the project spread. Again, I made a basic template and then create each card based on the main video preview, a number and the title for the subject.

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2 - Will individual accounts need to produce the cards - or can SteemChurch create for the members and issue them?

Cards & Tokens is very versatile and allows both approaches.

In one hand you can be the one-and-only creator of everything: the community manager, the community albums and the membership cards for every parishioner. They have to ask for the membership card, and you create it, publish it and issue it for them.

On the other hand, you can be just the community manager, meaning that you are the only one allowed to set somebody else's card as a membership card. In this case any user can create their own membership candidate card, and then ask you for aproval, that will give it the membership stamp on the card, becoming its author an official member of the community.

3 - Do the records of the cards sit on the Telos blockchain? Or can someone see my cards by looking at my Telos account? Or, do we only see them when we log into Cards & Tokens via your server?

The whole backend of Cards & Tokens is completely open, implemented on-chain with several smart contracts interacting among them. That means that anyone can create their own front end for this platform, meaning that every data is open for anyone.

In fact, I plan to open the source for anyone to create their own version of the user interface, as already happends with steemit.

4 - Can we create multi-membership cards allowing Parishioners to trade them if they like - and some lucky few might collect the whole set?

I'm not exacly sure what you mean in this question but I can tell you this. Each publication is a card and has a unique name. Each card may have several copies (from 1 to 100 or 2000. It depends on the creators level).

As a community manager, you can set some cards as membership cards for you community. If the card creator is you, you have to add the name of the user that is accepted as member with this card. If you are not the creator, then the author of the card will gain the membership for the community.

Regardless of the creator, the card still has a finite number of copies that can be collected in the community album and traded in card's market.

Something that has to be clear is that the owner of a copy of a membership card does not becomes a member (that's another kind of card). In the case of self made membership cards, the author is the member. And in the case of manager-made membership cards the member is specified in the card as a property (and shared among all copies).

Thanks

@sirknight, thanks for those questions and for being patient for the answers. I'm glad that I took my time the answer you because this membership card questions made me change part of the system architecture to adapt to this use case (which, I confess, was not supported before you). So, thank you for the idea and I hope to see you creating a lot of membership cards for the SteemChurch community in the future.