Ethics solutions of the 21st century will be based on decentralization, global awareness and collaboration. So why not introduce the tools that promote this movement inherently early on? Steem could be a suitable tool for Nemethic's goals. In a first phase, our blog posts are published on the original steem blockchain. This is a great opportunity to test first ideas and concepts, grow the community and measure the resonance in the steemit environment. Later on we can think to introduce an own cryptocurrency system in order to start a social ethics platform and a venture on its own. Nemethics will a need tailor-made set of rules to measure each contribution for the new decentralized ethical framework.
Steem principles applied on Nemethics
In the Steem white paper its main principle are clearly stated:
- everyone who contributes to a venture should receive pro-rata ownership, payment or debt from the venture.
- all forms of capital are equally valuable
- the community produces products to serve its members
These ideas are also valid for the ethical movement Nemethics wants to push forward. We want to value the contributions to the new ethical system and give ownership to contributors. Introducing a currency on its own would also allow Nemethics to accept capital that supports the development of the movement. This would not simply pick up the trend of crowd funding but actually allow crowed investing for longer term involvement (see ICO). The last principle is also crucial for a sustainable movement, but its also the one Nemethics has to think about in more details. Hence what is the actual benefit for its members and creators by contributing to the development?.
Adjusting the rules for an ethical platform
Steem faced the challenge to “deriving an algorithm for scoring individual contributions that most community members consider to be a fair assessment of the subjective value of each contribution.”. In contrast, Nemethics has to shape the Steem algorithm in order to value each contribution to be an “objective” advance toward Nemethics ultimate goal that is to strengthen global ethics of the 21st century. This is a vast challenge but has similarities with the challenges of Steem and other communities. The approach to find the appropriate algorithms to extract ethics from a social platform needs to be in line with the collaborative community approach Nemethics will use to realize its vision. Ideas about “self-regulatory information sharing in participatory social sensing” (Evangelos Pournaras et. al 2016) will be very helpful.
Technical requirements
The open-source nature of Steem allows for a collaborative fork (Steemit on Github). But at the moment we have little understanding of the technical requirements needed to start an own steem like platform. Do you have any hints or ideas which way Nemethics could go in this direction? Can such a system be hosted on another blockchain or do we have to create an own one? What can we learn from the success and pitfalls of steemit?