How we can self regulate - as a community

Hey all,

Below is a proposal for how we can eliminate fraudulent ICOs and create open, transparent projects using social systems in conjunction with blockchain systems.

Original post (nicer formatting):
https://medium.com/@vancepants/moi-the-marketplace-of-ideas-a7a1493bec95

TL:DR;
Tokenized assets create a powerful tool for project crowdfunding, but fraudulent/unproven/overly ambitious ICOs are destroying their credibility. Bad actors are invading the space and traditional regulation is ill-equipped to tackle such a fast moving technology in a constantly evolving environment.

The platform offers a social framework for stakeholder communities to monitor and collaborate with blockchain project teams. It works by reading a user's public blockchain address and issuing vote-credits equal to their stake. Like a stockholder, they vote on polls/initiatives/roadmap items and influence project direction.

MOI — The Marketplace of Ideas

The marketplace of ideas holds that the truth will emerge from the competition of ideas in free, transparent public discourse, and concludes that ideas and ideologies will be culled according to their superiority or inferiority and widespread acceptance among the population. - “Marketplace of Ideas”, Wikipedia

The Challenge of Crypto Crowdfunding
The Internet of Value is still in its infancy, but developing rapidly and with few constraints. Tokenized assets create a powerful, accessible crowdfunding mechanism, but the explosion of interest and capital has cultivated an overly speculative environment, and institutional regulators are poorly positioned to react. Private investors are ill equipped to evaluate a project’s performance or a team’s level of competence, which has produced an overall dangerous exposure to dishonest characters throughout the market.

Emerging projects and communities need to adopt new mentalities about what principles define a project’s value. To do so they’ll need tools that facilitate intuitive, verifiable measurements of project competence.

The Solution: Transparency and Accountability
The Marketplace of Ideas (MOI) is a central hub for community trust in an expanding world of trustless security; it borrows several best practices from Agile project management theory.

https://i.imgur.com/aA3AB0M.jpg

The governing ideology behind MOI presupposes that an Agile development team which is actively working and sufficiently transparent can provide assurances to investors. It also affirms that a tokenized asset is a security, and an individual who invests in a blockchain project funded with such tokenized assets is a stakeholder: they own a quantifiable stake in the project and have a vested interest in its operational success. Therefor, just as is the case with a traditional stockholder, a stakeholder has a right to exert influence over a project’s direction and priorities.

Institutions or projects which are crowdfunded under this model occupy a space within MOI. A space is created and self-governed by a community and serves two primary functions: to transparently display project-relevant information across a variety of sources, and to facilitate value-driven engagement among stakeholders.

Within a space, MOI provides a customizable, open-source framework for communities to aggregate news, discourse, and data via live activity feeds. It also allows for structured decision making, quantifying a user’s stake in a project by reading his associated account balance on the blockchain. Verified users may vote and provide feedback on initiatives, updates, opinion polls, and more with a vote-credit weight equal to their current account holdings, or they may delegate another user to take such actions on their behalf using a vote-by-proxy system (liquid democracy voting).

As the network of users within a space grows, the will of the majority becomes more authoritative. MOI validates the credibility of community sentiment and provides tools for non-developer stakeholders to weigh in on project priorities. As a consequence, institutions are better aligned with the motives of their supporters, and a free market token valuation accurately reflects the quality of a team’s progress and engagement.

Why it Works
In the sharing economy, entrepreneurs and content creators are increasingly beholden to their consumers. Below are several popular examples in which a provider or a consumer relies on positive feedback following a service interaction in order to secure trust and continuous business in the future:

Uber drivers / Uber riders
AirBnB hosts / AirBnB guests
Independent Retailers (i.e. sellers on Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, etc.)
YouTube / Twitch social media personalities

These platforms create an expectation of service based on the prior experiences of other users, and an explicit incentive for individuals to act responsibly if they wish to benefit from the value of the network.

To analogize this with MOI, a project team can be considered a service provider, and an investor a consumer. Project teams regularly provide updates and deliverables, which may take the form of blog updates, video reviews, interactive demos, earnings reports, or some other media. Investors consume these status updates and provide structured feedback when they vote in accordance with their stake.

Both parties within MOI have a responsibility:

Teams: regular status updates must be provided
Stakeholders: feedback must be provided (either directly or by proxy, allowing for passive participation)

If either party fails to meet their obligations they are penalized by the system, thus fulfilling the aforementioned expectation of service requirement. All stakeholder feedback is publicly visible to the entire community, creating an explicit incentive for the project team to react dynamically.

https://i.imgur.com/H2CEtla.png

In theory, the economic end result is that a project’s token value falls in accordance with low satisfaction scores, and rises with high scores. As such, teams which hold tokens are incentivized to keep stakeholder satisfaction high by providing regular status updates on their progress.

While participation is limited to stakeholders, the deliberation process is transparent to everyone. At scale, MOI cultivates a market environment made up of more accountable project teams, more honest investments, and more accurate token valuations.

As of today, I'm looking for constructive criticism on this idea as well as potential collaborators who want to help build out the platform. A prototype is under development but our most pressing needs will be creative ui/ux design and full stack web development.