There are many companies who could truly benefit the world from being open and free, a public good, such as Steemit Inc, Facebook, Google, etc. If Facebook were to open their platform to be fully open-source and interoperable, they could bring about a whole new wave of innovation in the social media industry, where anyone could build interfaces on top of Facebook and harvest the huge network effect that Facebook contains: it would become a community -- a network -- as a public good to be used by all.
To create such an open sourced, decentralized company, there needs to be a way to fund and receive profits. Facebook as an open social media network would be able to earn profits through fees on their open advertising network -- no need to change the business model -- which would then go into a smart contract account or other similar decentralized value store (cryptocurrency truly is required to enable this kind of DAO) representing the Facebook open network.
This smart contract is called the 'reward pool' or 'grant pool'. Over time, currency from this grant pool is released according to a token vote of either equity shares of Facebook such as a stock or native token or non-transferrable points received by being active on the Facebook network (might be like SP, but can't be powered up or down). The former would be the easiest option and if Facebook is giving profits to shareholders is the best option but for a truly open company there should be some sort of reputation system like the latter.
The smart contract releases currency from the reward pool over time according to a token vote (there could be a more complex system for this which I'll explain later). The community would presumably vote to fund developers, marketers, community building projects, etc.
This model for a decentralized, open company and ecosystem creates a truly community-driven public good which I believe is the model for the future of networks and communities. This same model could be used by Steem to distribute grants for developers, marketers, etc. and truly drive the platform forward. In the beginning, the community would likely fund 
This model will be very similar to what Stratos (SRTS) will be using, but with a slightly more complicated method of voting for grants -- users will be able to token vote for 11 'granters' who are voted in similar to witnesses -- the top 11 become the actual granters. These granters split the SRTS reward pool daily which they should use to distribute to users beneficial to Stratos such as developers, marketers, etc. or just themselves. This way, we can fund Stratos development, marketing, and community building in a decentralized way, making Stratos into a truly open and free network.
Stratos grant distribution will change in the future but for now we'll start out with only 3 granters, as I don't believe there are enough developers and people working on Stratos to have all 11 planned granters to be honest and not simply stealing from the reward pool by self-voting for granter. Over time the number of granters will go up through version updates until it reaches (or maybe passes) 11 granters. Also, for now SRTS will be used in the voting process for grants but in a future version STSP (Stratos power, maybe think of a better symbol?), a highly inflationary non-transferrable token distributed to users of the Stratos network, which also could include light proof of burn for SRTS and STEEM.
Wow, that was a long talk about the model -- now on to the update!
I've implemented the above system in the Stratos node and it is online in a pull request. It will be committed in a few hours but feel free to comment on the request even after it is committed -- I'll add the changes you request.
Also, you may have noticed that I created a new Github account https://github.com/stratos-steem for the Stratos project. I also set up CI for the repo so it can test pull requests as they're coming in.
Here's the PR text:
Anyone will be able to become a 'granter', meaning they will be able to receive daily SRTS inflation, by using the operation
become_granter. They can also stop being a granter by using operationstop_granter.
A user can vote for 11 granters at max, which they vote for using
granter_votewith an array of the usernames they wish to vote for. Then, 11 top granters are selected each day by summing up all votes (stake-weighted), which each receive one share of the daily reward pool. The daily reward pool can be added to by any subapp as profits from certain activities (such as paying for name selection, etc.) and will also be added to automatically from inflation from a preditermined curve (not created yet, seegetRewardPool(block)in distribute_grants.js).
API endpoints:
/grant-voting/grantersto get all granters and/grant-voting/@[username]to get granter votes of user [username].
And that's about all for now! I'm still looking for suggestions in terms of a) ideas for Stratos in the future and b) what order these should be executed. So far on my list is:
- Communities (in progress already)
- Non-fungible tokens
- Steem x EOS chainlink through Stratos (more details in a future post)
So could you please comment what you think the priority of these three are as well as any other ideas you might have to be implemented in Steem via Stratos!