I’ve followed the Utopian project since @elear’s first post, and the progress since inception is very inspiring. Utopian if you do not know, “enables everyone to contribute to open source projects by providing ideas, code contributions, graphics or social exposure and be rewarded for that with Steem”(full post here: https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@elear/utopian-this-is-now-getting-serious). Utopian.io has been up and running for over a month or so now and it has seen steady growth. More people are contributing, voting, and the platform is beginning to see more notoriety. All of which is all well and good, but still I do not believe people understand the possibilities of such an open source friendly platform such as Utopian and the reasons it is so crucially needed.
Open Project Development
Open Communication
Through Utopian & GitHub anyone can actively monitor the progress of an open source project with few impedances. Meaning users and customers are no longer stonewalled by corporate regulations and customer service jargon. Instead, users can give input directly to the product developers making it easier for developers to create satisfying products.
These platforms allow anyone to contribute. Meaning users can submit new features directly to developers without doing any paperwork. No more begging a big company to fix their poorly maintained platform only to receive automated responses.
When improvements are needed, a user can log in to Utopian.io and create an in-depth post detailing their given problem. Users with a similar problem can save time by upvoting this post instead of reporting the same/similar problem again. This saves the users time and the developers time. Subsequently, this decreases the problem-to-solved time, meaning problems are solved quicker because there are less impedances in the process because of Utopian.io’s straightforward design.
Efficient Development Process
Now those are a lot of important advantages. By using Utopian.io communication between users and developers is not only more transparent, but also more efficient. Its more efficient because of the lack of red tape from inefficient corporate processes. Meaning, development costs are massively decreased from lower administrative costs. This is a huge bonus for everyone! What’s even better is some of those savings flow back into your wallet, which I will talk about more later.
In modern times, the trend for tech companies is rapid explosive growth in the early stages, but much lower growth as the company scales and inefficient corporate structures are implemented. A company with innovative technologies and a great team can still fail solely because of corporate shortcomings. Often the news reports about high potential startups going bankrupt because executives mismanaged the company. This is ridiculous! When we open source platforms, these impedances are removed.
Many of the top platforms available today can be alternatively open sourced. What’s great is in 2017 many open source alternatives have indeed been launched or announced. An example being @ChainBB, an alternative to the popular Reddit.com. @Utopian is of course an open source project experiencing rapid growth recently with many contributing in every way they can.
Decentralized Structure
A huge bonus of this open source project structure is the community-driven decision making. At first one may not realize the importance of this feature until they look at it further.
Utopian-io allows people to be paid based on their contribution. The more beneficial the contribution, the more one gets paid and vice versa. Who decides this? The COMMUNITY! To put it better: the projects community base determines who is rewarded for what contributions, leaving no one person in authority.
In this way, contributors (users and developers) are the biggest influencer on the direction of the project. The users give feedback on the platform and developers are free to develop the project as they see fit. The community as a whole directs which way the platform goes through individual contributions. In a sense, the given technology is developed naturally throughout time by its community.
Imagine if the biggest technology companies and platforms were being developed and lead by the people who actually use them like you. Think about how much better these platforms would be. Because of the wave of new application being developed, we can imagine less and do more. Through a decentralized open source structure, technologies can be developed for the people, by the people, just the people.
A hidden benefit of open source decentralized projects is project perpetuity. Project perpetuity is the continuous maintaining and development of a project. Many times we a company goes bankrupt or closes for whatever reason much of their project is sold off and dissembled. Another common outcome is a company will be bought out by a large one and the technologies will be shelved never to be seen again. So much advanced technology has been built but lost because the person who owned it has mishandled the technologies developed by minds brighter than them. Open source solves this problem by making a technology openly available to anyone who can then develop it further without being hindered.
Profitable To Contributors, Better For Everyone
Everyone needs to eat and food costs money. For people to consistently contribute to open source projects they are going to need to be paid. This has been a problem intelligent people have been attempting to solve for a while now. For this reason, many people were excited with the introduction of Utopian.io built on the steem blockchain.
By using technologies like Utopian users and developers can earn steem by reporting bugs and submitting ideas, graphics, translations, documentation, analysis about git projects, and individual git commits. Here’s an example below.
$65.34 is pretty good pay for reporting one bug. What’s important to note is that quality contributors are often rewarded much higher through upvotes and resteems than poorer quality contributors. This gives developers incentive to improve the open source application in return earning steem. Plus, users have more incentive to report bugs and contribute ideas to better the platform. Let’s not forget that people can also contribute through ways like analysis of the application or documentation, etc. This leads to a wide-ranging community of people developing many applications at rapid intervals, much faster than most established companies.
Utopian Moving Forward
Utopian has made a great deal of progress in its short life, but the growth is far from over. Overtime, more projects on GitHub.com will begin to integrate with Utopian.io increasing the average payouts. Hopefully, more projects will move to an open source structure so that one day everything from video games to industrial grade software will be developed and maintained by the communities which they serve.
Special thank you to @elear @utopian-io for creating such a well thought-out platform. Please stay tuned for a post which will reveal a proposal for a new community built steem application. This project will be developed fully through Utopian.io & GitHub See you soon!
“My past is my only competition. My future is my only ambition.” – @markhalen just now
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