Utopian (or Utopian Colony) is a new project, that is yet to be fully operative, but it has an original idea in the basis and a decent following.
What's the Idea of Utopian Colony?
UC is here to provide people of all possible digital professions with a fast and straightforward connection with open source projects and contributors and create the ecosystem for these projects and people involved in them. The open source ecosystem will let all the specialists work with the open source projects they like. People will have the ability to collectively finance the projects that can be useful for them. It will create a responsible and open environment where the needs of people will and the skills of developers will come together, people will have the products they need, developers will be paid directly by the users of the products they made. UC is planning to launch the platform in Q2 2019. The people behind Utopian Colony claim that they know how to incentivize the contributions and encourage innovation. These two processes are pillars of Utopian Colony. Utopian Colony is based on the Steem blockchain.
A Little Bit of History
The project is quite young, it started in September of 2017. First UC was exploring the needs of contributors and open source projects. The developers of Utopian Colony were not the only people who had such interest so the project started to attract more and more people (developers, contributors, and many others). Overall to date the platform had already supported around 70,000 contributions made by around 5,000 contributors to over 9,000 open source projects.
Utopian Colony is connecting people using the proof-of-concept. With the time developers explored that graphic artists, writers, marketers, designers, translators, and many other professionals need the comfortable open source exosystem, too. That's when UC started transformation into the massive universal collaboration platform. Currently, the project is raising money.
Opportunities Provided By Utopian Colony
Open source isn't limited by sharing code. Utopian Colony encourages people to share their experience, tutorials, and use all other possible channels to fruit the professional ecosystem. The platform offers reward solutions (in different currencies) for such activity as open source blogging, etc.
Another notable feature is an integrated multi-currency bounty exchange that will stimulate contributors to work, and project owners will have the ability to get the crowdsourcing of their platforms or development of some specific aspects of their products by freelance contributors. Tasks can be executed by anyone who's able to do the work while owners will always have a number of possible professionals around. That's the community Utopian Colony is going to build soon.
The platform already has a seasoned team of the reviewers who professionally do their job utilizing the guidelines created by Utopian Colony. They will support the new reviewers on the platform, and, of course, there is an opportunity to start getting paid for the qualified reviews.
The Utopian Colony profile is similar to social media accounts. The users reveal some information to others in order to mark themselves professionally. They use Opportunity Explorer feeds to search for new interesting tasks, projects, partners, and so on. The wallet and the messenger are also there.
More Than Just a Platform
The goal of the Utopian Colony is to create a strong community of professionals, the pool of people who can do their job well, or the new projects kitchen, space where one can apply the skills and get something in return if these skills prove to be useful for others.
In order to galvanize the community, Utopian Colony runs hackathons (uHack events) and produces the weekly IdeaHub and FOSSHub shows and podcasts. The topic is all aspects of open source innovation. Many great projects were started thanks to these initiatives.
Conclusion
As you can see the Beta version is coming soon and a lot of work was already done in the past. The project managed to partner with such companies as CoinGecko, EFTG, Quasar, Steempress, and several others.
The concept of Utopian Colony looks pretty attractive. Is it really utopian? No, looks like a real thing considering the example of diverse social media platforms that built a lot of communities. Is it a colony? Yes, probably we can call this platform so, because the conventional platforms lack the usable functionality provided by UC so this platform is something new, like a new land for pilgrims of digital professional space.