This is the second post of the series. You can see the first one here.

When I chose the name for the series, I meant it as a way to describe the possible use cases of Steem beyond blogging and social media, the main use cases for which the Steem blochchain is known for.

But if I have to explain the title, it's probably not the best one. :)

Let's continue with it.

Wikipedia describes utopia as "an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its citizens", and therefore its citizens would be utopians.

Today we will see why there is an important group on the Steem blockchain which call themselves utopians, and we'll try to understand if their utopia is imagined or real and tangible.

Open Source versus Close Source Software

Before we talk about utopians - Steem-style - we need to understand a few things about open source and close source software.

There is two ways to write software:

• close source: also known as proprietary code, where only specified people are allowed to change or even see the code, and it is often created for a customer or inside a company, who will own it. This is the preferred way of developing projects by corporations, because they want it to be copyrighted and unavailable to competition.
• open source: everyone can see the code and can propose changes to it, which the project owner can include or not. Anyone can use the code or parts of it to create their own version of the software, or include in a completely different project.

The open source code development has picked up speed immensely, especially with the frenzy of projects blockchain-related.

This choice to keep projects open source has proven better in many ways, from improved speed of the development though collaboration, easier to identify and correct bugs, more trust through transparency.

Introducing Utopian.io

The problem is how do you properly compensate coders (and not only them) for their work in an open source model. I mean, the corporations won't be interested to pay you, since they don't own the product of your work and everyone has access to it.

Well, the largely misunderstood crypto world found a way to recognize and compensate the value of these open source contributions.

That is where utopian.io comes in.

A serious site, with people ranked by their previous contributions who analyze both new projects and smaller or bigger contributions to existing ones, and offer or not a nice incentive (a.k.a. an upvote in the Steem "lingo") according to the work done. These rewards have monetary value and can be exchanged to USD, EUR or other fiat currency, if the contributor wishes.

The contributions being analyzed must fall under one of these categories, and respect a certain standard:

• suggestions
• development
• bug hunting
• translations
• graphics
• analysis
• visibility
• documentation
• tutorials
• video tutorials
• copyrighting
• blog

Not all categories of contributions have the same chances of being accepted. For example, a contribution in the category "development" has a much higher chance of being accepted than a "suggestion".

The link between utopian.io and blogging is that the contribution needs to be announced via a blog post and using the #utopian-io tag. But is this simple blogging? As you can see it's not.

Final Words

I hope this second example gives you a better understanding of the countless possibilities which can be laid on the foundation of the Steem blockchain. I know I've said this before, but this is only the beginning...

Fast-forward one year into the future and even I might not be able to recognize the Steem ecosystem then, because every new technology develops in leaps, and we are about to leap again on the Steem blockchain. You still have time to join in early.

Posted from my Wordpress blog.