I have chosen to talk about this today because they have just launched a proper landing page to use to promote Utopian.
Like I said in the prologue, imagine GitHub but with cryptocurrency rewards. I’ll show you inside the Utopian platform in a minute but they even have a ‘sync with GitHub’ feature which is a big plus.
So we know that an ever increasing percentage of software is open source, and the main reason for that I would say is trust.
The second reason I would say is crowdsourcing creative ideas. Or as Utopian puts it on their landing page ‘collective intelligence’.
Utopian isn’t just for programmers however.
If we scroll down to the moderators section, just above that we see all the categories that contributions can fall into.
So translations are valuable to open source projects, as are graphic design skills, and the category that I would be most likely to submit to… video tutorials.
Then they have human moderators that earn rewards by doing quality control on submissions and ultimately the platform sustains itself by taking a percentage of the rewards as a fee.
It says here that 5% of the total rewards go to pay the moderators for example.
[click rewards menu button]
And if you’re wondering where the money comes from, it comes from the Steem blockchain.
If you’ve been following me for any length of time you’ll probably know what Steem is because I post all of my content on there, if not it’s a blockchain platform that allocates newly created currency to people based on how the community votes.
The Steem community votes when they believe someone has added value to the Steem ecosystem and then that person gets a share of newly created Steem.
This ecosystem is now starting to flower into lots of sub-communities consisting of other projects built to make use of this rewards system.
These are all listed under ‘Choose a project…’.
Now let’s take a quick look inside.
Like all apps built on Steem you can log in to all of them using the same Steem account, just like when you see the option to ‘Login with Facebook’ for example.
Here on the right is that Sync with Github tool I mentioned earlier, meaning you can suck in your existing Github entries rather than starting from scratch.
And then you’ve got this horizontal scroll bar to filter entries by the category they fall into.
To my mind this is still hard to navigate but Utopian is also still in it’s early stages so I’ll cut them some slack on that.
The funny thing is that you can use the Utopian platform to submit suggestions on how to improve the Utopian platform. It’s a self evolving system so to speak.
If I want to make a submission I just hit the contribution button, select the category, accept the rules and away we go.
Another crazy feature is this search feature that allows you to contribute to existing Github projects.
If I type EOS for example, then press enter, it displays a list of existing projects on Github, amazing.
So you can check this out for yourself at Utopian.io, it’s free to join and free to use and because it’s self funding via the Steem blockchain it has an element of sustainability built right in.
I think this is preferable to an ICO because it allows a little bit to be built and then rewarded, then another bit to be built based on feedback and then rewarded and so on.
That’s how DTube has been built as well as other Steem based apps, and I like it.
And of course I’m happy about this because it’s going to add a great amount of value to the Steem cryptocurrency which I hold a lot of.
But then again, this is why I hold a lot of it, because I can see how valuable it is as a platform to give birth to projects like Utopian.
In Conclusion Then Before We End With The Market Roundup, What Did I Learn Today?
We know incentives are the name of the game.
Up until now, contributions to open source projects have gone largely un-rewarded financially.
Utopian brings us a great way for talented people to contribute to open source projects and be rewarded, and that incentive can only attract more talent to the increasingly important open source software industry.