What did Assembly do, and can we have their domain name?
To make a long story short, projects were pitched to an idea board, and were up or down-voted on by community members. Ideas that got traction were "green-lit", which basically meant that the Assembly company would provide resources for it like hosting, DNS, email services, git repositories, etc., etc.
Apps that were greenlit could create bounties for work that needed to be performed, and any member of the community could collect on those bounties. Need design work like logos and icons? A designer (or many designers) could grab the work and submit their entries. Each unit of work would be awarded a pre-determined amount, and those payments amounted to a blockchain allocation -- e.g., submitting a logo might be worth 100 points, while submitting the accepted logo might be worth 1,000 points. That 1,000 points equated to ownership. If there were 10,000 points awarded to date, your 1,000 points were worth 10% ownership.
If the product was developed, completed, marketed, etc., and turned a profit, Assembly would collect a rake to cover expenses, and all the profits were paid out based on allocation.
It was a good system, really, and resulted in some pretty neat projects. That said, I'm not surprised to see it being shuttered. A while back they pivoted most of their tools into being some kind of community changelog, and as a fairly active participant, I literally stopped using it after that, as I had no idea how to use it, saw no instructions, and all the chatrooms that had existed previously had been shuttered in favor of the changelog.
I assume, but have no inside knowledge, that between participation dropoff, and the other end -- that many projects were either never completed, never marketed, never got traction, or not really good, they were outlaying too much and getting too little success on the other end.
For a (probably) better description of what they were, this article is handy: http://tech.co/assembly-basically-group-projects-adults-2015...
It was a good system, really, and resulted in some
pretty neat projects. That said, I'm not surprised
to see it being shuttered. A while back they pivoted
most of their tools [...]
My take is that Assembly (the original platform) failed because for a project (being developed on the platform) to succeed it needs passionate people heavily invested in a vision for the project: the majority of projects created on Assembly didn't have this, they had people who thought "this is cool" and were willing to contribute an hour or 2, but they lacked passionate leaders. 100 people who think "this is cool" aren't worth 1 that thinks "this is the future, I'm putting everything I have into this". Most projects on Assembly effectively limped from contributor to contributor.
Buckets was a good example of a project being built on Assembly that had the chance to succeed because there was a lead developer who was driving it forward, he was very passionate, had a vision and invested a lot of his time into it, and others were providing value even if they just dedicated an hour or so.
Assembly (the company) probably would have had a better chance of succeeding if they had built the platform and then had their employees focused on leading projects, being the passionate leaders projects need and giving the community a few years to grow to the point where it was self sustaining. Firesize is a good example of what was possible, but unfortunately that was only one of a few projects that had passionate people involved.
I really liked Assembly and it's a shame it didn't work out. I think the idea has a chance one day but it needs time to grow organically, I don't think it can work as a VC backed company that is expected to grow however many percent month on month...
I think that is the key. The open source process just works on a much slower time frame then what is required of what was pretty much a VC business model.
>"...if they had built the platform and then had their employees focused on leading projects, being the passionate leaders projects need and giving the community"
I do think a platform like this could work, they would have to incorporate what is essentially a match making service between founders and the existing open source projects. Once a project finds a critical mass of clarity, it gets infused with purpose and direction by a founder.
https://archive.is/20150520215548/https://assembly.com/help/...
In case the above's contents are lost to the ravages of entropic bitrot, here's the first paragraph:
"How does Assembly work?
Assembly enables products--from software and hardware, to
online communities--to be built like open source projects.
Contributors earn a part of a product (in App Coins) when
they complete a bounty made by that product's core team."