"Get paid in crypto to make posts about anything I like?", I curiously requested a confirmation from @veganrobot who just introduced me to Steemit. I was somewhat familiar with cryptocurrencies before that, but had no real knowledge due to it all looking too complicated to me (now, upon sharing this information with other people, I always find it's the same for most of people)... Coming from a permacultural background, this Steem-thing seemed so simple and logical at the moment that it generated a spiral of thoughts, and - an eureka!
"Why has no one thought of this before?"
"Can this be used as a crowdfunding platform for people to support a cause without loosing anything?
"Can people use this to fund permacultural projects?"
Is this a better way of sharing knowledge?
Spreading the permacultural word, I struggled for years to make up my mind, should I charge people for the knowledge I share? One voice in me tells me that I shouldn't, because of a concept, an ideal I have inside my mind and heart - that knowledge is free. On the other hand, I understood that teaching people is a time and effort consuming process and that I should get something in return. I consider myself a permacultural geek, and I must say that I rarely find myself talking to other people with which the knowledge sharing is mutual and the effort is the same on both sides.
A friend and I were making a workshop about strawbale gardening (if you want, I will share the documents on this blog, just mention it in the comments), at the end of which someone asked about donations. At the same moment, everyone stood up and started giving us money. "Stop, stop, stop! Now we're going to do it like this. Maximum donation is 20 kn (around 4 bucks)." - said the friend. At first, I was surprised, but soon realised it was a matter of equality. Some people were holding bills of 200 kn, and some of 20. To someone in the group, it might appear that the people handing out larger amounts were more generous or more thankful for the knowledge provided. It could be closer to the truth that the people handing out bills of twenty were simply short on money... Heck, maybe it was their last money!
With Steemit this problem is solved. As you all know, your upvote weight is entirely determined by your steem and vote power. That means, if you're broke, you're gonna have less influence, but no one is going to ask themselves do you appreciate the content - it is clear you do. If you want to show that the content is not enough for a full vote, you can always use less vote power. To get to the point(s), I didn't start this article to express that Steemit is great just for financing education.
Permaculture, a culture, not just a way to do agriculture
It was in 1960's that Bill Mollison first coined the term permaculture. At the time, it was a system of land management that could potentially be productive, for, well, eternity. Soon, the adopters of this idea realised that the mindset shouldn't be applied exclusively to the garden, the field, the orchard or the food forest. It became just a way of looking at things, a different perspective. Permaculturists take great effort to realise the inputs and outputs of a system (a state, a city, a community, a man, a garden, a house, a chicken, a tree, a food forest). To make it all resilient and sustainable, and, perhaps, self-sustaining, permaculturists cross the inputs and outputs of various systems - which we call the edge effect.
To give you an example, I drawn this infographic detailing some of the interactions between me, my garden and the STEEM blockchain,
I gather all of the waste from the kitchen and compost it to give nutrients to the plants, in return I get food and many, many fun and useful experiences, which I turn into content and knowledge and share it with the community on the STEEM blockchain... It also allows me to learn more, as I am not the only one willing to share the knowledge and the experience. Not only that, but the blockchain gives value to my opinion, and everything I do has the potential to be awarded, fueling more garden projects. Not only does the garden inspire me and give me something to write about, it also provides me with esthetic scenery I can use in the posts.
Influence - creation and development of ideas and solutions powered through the STEEM blockchain
I believe every idealist's goal is to become influential enough to spread your own ideals, making a positive change around yourself, but also, broadcasting your ideas to a wider audience, having an impact on the whole world. Every service on the internet I've seen limits this behaviour, either by requesting payments or censoring content - directly limiting the freedom of the idealists. Here, on the STEEM blockchain, your idea, your content is what creates value, and your investment of the value makes you influential. That means that, indirectly, the weight of your idea is the weight of your influence.
Support - show respect and gratitude without loosing anything
Changing the world is a lot easier when more people want to change the world in a similar fashion. In real life, to really support another fellow activist (and help him with whatever he's doing), requires giving out something you have, which often times means that you will do less (unless what you give is excess of that particular thing). On the STEEM blockchain, you have what I consider an influence and support allowance, which is the voting power. Ofcourse, your voting power is limited so that you must choose wisely who to support and what should be ignored (or even flagged).
Suddenly, everyone's voice matters!
All of this means that free speech stopped having so much boundaries. Anyone can broadcast their opinion or activity and get a valuable feedback which might support whatever they're doing, or make him change his mind or behaviour, according to what the crowd wants, approves, disapproves or is irrelevant about. Opinions and acts that are valuable to the society get financed, meaning that larger circles of people can make smaller ones succeed if they want them to (without loosing anything).
Crowdfunding squared
To me, it seemed like a heap of unnecessary work to get something crowdfunded. You need to make them register at a website they most likely never use, connect their credit card to it and make them donate to your project, potentially limiting their financial capabilities. Here, we just need to get people interested, prove value of a project and the crowd will upvote our content without loosing anything but voting power which replenishes to a full pool every 5 days (making them choose to support only what they consider to be the most valuable thing they saw in the time period).
Why we should understand our social ecosystems like fractals
In permaculture, sociocracy is held to a great amount of respect. Sociocracy focuses on the consensus of a small intentional community. The larger the community is, usually it takes more time and effort for the community to agree on something - which means that this system is impossible to scale. One way to adjust this problem is to connect more smaller communities in a larger system, where a public relations person introduces the opinion of the smaller community to the larger audience, which must also get to a consensus to bring the opinion to a village, city or state level. This makes it incredibly slow to implement, requires a tremendous amount of effort and is totally ineffective on the broader levels. When I come to think of it, looked from a distance, to me it looks like a pyramidal system, which we all know rarely is just, and I can't see how the concept of the consent of the whole and such a system can go hand-in-hand.
Sociocracy and meritocracy combined
Upon learning about the STEEM technology, I stumbled upon the term meritocracy - a system in which anyone's influential power is determined by their merits - everything they do and have done for the community which is of value to the whole community. It suddenly dawned on me - maybe, we could use sociocracy on the smallest level - an intentional organization of up to 9 people, while tech-driven meritocracy can be applied to greater circles of people, as it is proven to be fast and effective. The more people consent on something, the more impact it will have on the world and the STEEM blockchain makes it all possible. When @ned first told us about SMTs, I became interested, but now I can see that a small circle of people (for now, @veganrobot) and I will definitely start something with the technology.
Unsatisfied with what is, we dream of what we could do about it
It was atleast three years ago that a friend, @veganrobot and I were sitting, eating peanuts and discussing ecological food standards we have today. One, "eco" standard, contrary to the label, is far from being ecological. Using soil-damaging chemicals is allowed and practices that ruin ecological diversity are sometimes even encouraged - for example, they take away funds they have given you if you interplant an orchard with aromatic plants (meaning monoculture is stimulated, rathen then punished). Soil quality and lack of use of harmful chemicals is not proven in any way, terrain inspection is rarely done, the arrival of the investigator is announced before-hand (leaving room to hide anything suspicious) and all they do is talk to the farmer. Being on the farmer's property, the investigator has no interrogation power and the meeting is often reduced to drinking a cup of coffee and talking about random things.
At the time of the conversation, we we're sure we needed to establish a new standard with greater impact on the agricultural circles of people, and something the people trust and desire (as opposed to knowing that the label means absolutely nothing). The problem is, we had no idea how to conduct this, as it would require a strong community of knowledgeable investigators with expensive instruments, and a lot of time on their hands. The only way to form such a union is by both finding the people that are passionate enough about ecology to never just sit down and drink coffee with the farmer, but to actually do some work... Ofcourse, as it is a time-consuming process, each investigator should be paid for the work, making the farmer pay for the service, greatly impacting the price to the end consumer in a negative manner.
eco+
a decentralized ecological standard that incentivizes ecological activism and behaviour
I'm here on Steemit for more than a month writing articles... The most interesting thing I noticed is that everyone is being so kind - I only found one negative comment of all the articles I saw and read.
In the conversation about the new ecological standard, we were missing two pieces of the puzzle - a keyword - decentralization and the tech to make it all reality - the blockchain. The greatest inspiration here (which brought the idea back from the dead) is the STEEM blockchain. I thought:
"If STEEM can make people act in a certain way - stop them from spamming or being unkind, if we tweek it, can it make people be transparent about what they're doing - can it directly make them act in a ecological way by rewarding them for each behaviour, be it checking up on someone else's work or doing the work themselves?"
This question led to the formation of a core idea we will use in the creation of the standard - incentivize ecological work and grant the people ability to block rewarding of what isn't ecological... It will be creating a firm net of people, associations, communities, activities, behaviours, gardens, food forests and trees that all agree on (atleast) one statement: everything that the system pays for is truly ecological (as people will only support what is and block/flag what isn't).
So you might ask, how shall we go about doing this? Well, you should definitely subscribe to our project's Steemit blog, so you get all updates on the project. If you want to take part in the creation of this (or you want to be one of the first people to use it), please leave a comment below. First updates, detailing how the system should work are going to be released next week, so stay tuned!
