Review of the Developer Program, Portal and API docs of the Civic Project

What is Civic?

In our modern society many systems and services require personal authentication of some sort. This can get very tedious for many people and that can often lead to many complications and problems because often times there is a systematic or any other kind of hitch and some people need to wait a long time for the company to confirm their identity. 

Other serious issues are the identity theft that causes major problems for organizations and data breaches. Companies pay crazy amounts of money just so they can keep themselves safe from these issues. That is why our society needs a way to mitigate these risks and live calmer and that is how Civic came to be. Civic uses mobile devices and biometric technology to access information stored on a blockchain. Using those methods one can use their phone and fingerprint to prove who they are in a faster and more secure way.

In short, Civic is a new way for organizations to verify the identities of their employees and users and to keep their personal information safe from today`s issues.

Developer Program

One really creative thing that I like about the Civic crew is that they were smart enough to include such a thing as a “Developer Program” which functions similar to a forum for submitting, voting and developing ideas that a certain community would like to see integrated into a system.

Good ideas for what plugins to add, what languages to use and other generally good ideas that are well received and very popular are going to get prioritized by the Civic team with bounty rewards which developers can earn if they work on the idea. The massive plus that this gives them is that the system is never going to stop growing in a positive matter as long as the registered users vote honestly for the good ideas, of course. 

The Developer Program ensures that the possibility of adding an update that is badly perceived by the public happening is close to none, because before anything is added, it is already viewed by the users and has an estimated amount of people who would like it based on how many votes it has. 

Bad udpades often create a big problem for the system because it brings negative reviews and bad press, not to mention that it becomes less enjoyable to use. Thanks to the Developer Programs, this is highly unlikely to happen with Civic.

Integration Portal

Before being able to use the Integration Portal, the user obviously has to have the Civic app installed on their phone. For that they`ll need Android 6.0 or higher and a couple of MB of space. After installing the app the user can now create their account using the Civic website. Thanks to the app this is easily done and now they have to create the company and the Application. 

Thankfully there is a Test Mode that can be configured before launching a request so that they can upgrade to Live Mode. At the beginning, it was only possible for a single developer to have access to the Civic Integration portal but thankfully they added the Team Management feature which does exactly as it says.

In the team management feature there are three user categories: owner, administrator and developer. Each has different rights and they have different levels of access in the Integration Portal.

One of the best parts about the Integration Portal is the fact that they are still working on updating it more and for that they can and are using their Developer Program.

API Documents

For the convenience of every developer (and some users), the Civic team has decided to publish the documents for the API on their website. These documents hold information on what kind of technologies they have used in their JS code as well as information on how to get integrated into their system. 

The way they chose to present the information is rather interesting as they not only explain about the functions of their app as they also talk about how it works with the help of an intuitive web-design to show pieces of code alongside the text so that it is easier to understand how things piece together. 

Written with great care, the explanations are easy to understand, the color scheme isn`t tiring on the eyes, which is a plus on its own. Whether you are trying to learn about the code or how to use the application, there are highlighted information bubbles scattered all across the page that are there to give additional information for things that can easily be misunderstood or overlooked.

Disclosure: This article is participating in the ICO Bounty Media Campaign for reward. Please be advised that everything written in the article is my personal opinion and it is NOT investment advice. 

Civic's Website: https://www.civic.com/

Civic's Whitepaper: https://tokensale.civic.com/CivicTokenSaleWhitePaper.pdf