Okos: Monetizing your Intellect

We argue that people should be financially rewarded for sharing their specific knowledge specially in forums and Q&A websites.

Our team is multi-disciplinary and includes members from various backgrounds and skill sets including a PhD Candidate, Senior Financial Advisor, Senior Operations Lead, Senior Full Stack Developer, as well as a Senior Blockchain Consultant.

[IMPACT]

Our proposal includes:

- The release of a discourse forum plugin
- The release of a utility token called Okos to be used in discourse forums equipped with the released plugin

- The release of an identity aggregator where a single individual with different forum handlers and usernames can tie those usernames to a single Okos wallet address

Forum owners will be able to download the plugin and deploy it on their website.

Once the plugin is installed, several features will be added to the forum. These include, but are not limited to, the ability for a user to stake and pay a certain amount of Okos for a question/problem he or she needs answered/analyzed. In turn, users can share their answers and accordingly be eligible to “gain” the staked Okos token.

This results in a win-win-win situation where the 3 entities participating in the transaction benefit in the following way:

The user, who is asking the question and is willing to pay for satisfactory answers, receives a good and dedicated answer from an expert or an experienced user.

The knowledge experts receive a financial reward as compensation for their time and expertise. This motivates them to consistently monitor the forum for additional questions and in turn, answer them to further gain tokens.

The forum owner receives a small cut from the token transaction as the owner and the maintainer of the medium that facilitated this transaction.

In our proposal, we divide the Okos token into two subtypes:

- Purchased Okos (P-OKS)

- Earned Okos (E-OKS)

Earned Okos can only be acquired by participating in forums and answering questions asked within those forums. Purchased Okos, on the other hand, can be acquired from any address. A user can transfer earned Okos to purchased Okos, but not the other way around. Therefore, the higher the amount of earned Okos, the higher the participation and contribution of the user in the forum.

Note: In the event that a user wants to convert their Earned Okos to Purchased Okos to, for example, cash out, smart contract calculation would still show that this individual, at a certain point in time, had a specific amount of Okos and will still be regarded as a high contributor to the forum.

Furthermore, it could be that a single individual can be a member in several forums using different usernames and handles. Our proposal also includes a verification mechanism where several different forum usernames can be bound to a single Okos identity, therefore a single wallet address.

The list of discourse forums that support the plugin and enable the transfer of Okos tokens between users will be publicly listed where users can see this list and accordingly choose any forum of their interest to participate in and either acquire knowledge or post answers. By using such an approach, we believe that users who answer questions will be motivated to answer more, as more participation would mean more income.

Currently, our team has put together a small proof of concept and developed a basic discourse plugin which was successfully integrated into test forums. Also, a basic identity aggregator proof of concept website was developed that showcased a successful working combination with the plugin.

Initially, our main target will be to reach out to forum owners to deploy our plugins. This will enable several already populated forums to get exposure to the proposal and the plugin. This would drive traction in terms of plugin and token usability.

Then, since members of a certain forum are usually members of other forums too, the traction would extend to those forums as well. At this stage, marketing will take place to target forum owners as well as individuals that may want to start a new forum based on the plugin, and encourage their users to use the Okos token.

Additionally, we will try to list the discourse plugin on the official plugins page at the discourse forum’s official website.

Finally, we will work towards listing the token in a well established crypto exchange platform.

The main challenge would be to convince and market the plugin to current forum owners as well as to individuals who want to set-up a new Okos based discourse forum. We would tackle this by digital marketing strategies using current & widely used channels (i.e. Twitter, etc.), as well as using manual approaches and reach-outs to forum owners or individuals with high participation rates on a given forum via messages, emails, DMs and texts.

[FEASIBILITY]

Q2 2022: Technical and business whitepaper
Q2 2022: Starting the discourse plugin development

Q2 2022: Start of Okos token smart contract development
Q2 2022: Start of Okos identity aggregator development

Q3 2022: Finalizing of discourse plugin development
Q3 2022: Finalizing of Okos token smart contract development
Q3 2022: Finalizing of Okos identity aggregator development

Q3 2022: Release of Okos token on Testnet
Q3 2022: QA testing between forum plugin, identity aggregator & token transactions

Q4 2022: Sorting legal aspects (KYC, anti-money laundry rules)
Q4 2022: Establishing Okos Foundation to lead the project (maintain, develop, etc.)
Q4 2022: Okos website development
Q4 2022: Move Project to Mainnet

Q1 2023: Deploy marketing channels (twitter, discourse, how-to videos)
Q1 2023: Reach out forum owners to deploy plugin

Development work (identity aggregator, verification mechanism, smart contract design, plugin design, and coding):

Development - $30,000 (35$/hour)
Marketing - $10,000
Legal - $6000
Miscellaneous - $4,000

Total = 50,000 $ USD

(We might need to apply for Fund 9 for another round of funding)

Arthur Dzaghgouni - Senior Financial Advisor
Sarhad Arisdakessian - PhD Candidate, Computer Science
Andres Zunino (Zircon Tech) - Senior Blockchain Consultant
Will Olivera (Zircon Tech) - Senior Full Stack Developer
Vahe Dzaghgouni - Operational Lead

[AUDITABILITY]

We will be taking two approaches to measure the progress of our development. Firstly, we will try to stick to the deadlines in terms of achieving what we publish on our website regarding our roadmap. Second, from a technical perspective, our work would be on our GitHub channel, where anyone can check the updates and the ‘commits’ done openly.

Taking a sequential step-by-step approach to achieve each milestone in our roadmap and making sure the deliverables work after each timeframe would be considered a success. From a technical perspective, the ideal success is where several pieces of the project (the Okos token, the discourse plugin, and the identity aggregator) work in unison without any bugs. From a non-technical perspective, we would consider the project successful if, after releasing the plugin, we can have several forum owners start utilizing it and there is traction in the utility of the token.

This project is a new project and has not been proposed previously.