Announcing Prism.IO Private Beta
Announcing The Prism IO Community Development Platform
The Problem
When it comes to engaging with customers, users and other outside stakeholders (broadly defined as “community”) companies today have fairly limited options for sufficiently motivating their community members to engage and act on their behalf.
Even for simple tasks such as taking a survey, completing a poll, contributing a review or submitting a bug report or feature request, at best ~1% of total community members will ever have sufficient motivation to contribute their time.
With token-based networks, this dynamic changes and early token purchases are incentivized to contribute to improving and growing the network to increase the value of their token.
However, this benefit is currently limited by the amount of token-buyers who participate in any given project, which is often times as small as a few hundred participants or less.
The Status Quo
When it comes to engaging with customer community members today, organizations have a few options:
- Setting up a general purpose community forum themselves using Open Source Forum Software. (Free/Cheap to use, but can be buggy and a headache to install and maintain) e.g: Vanilla Forums (free), Discourse (paid), vBulletin (paid) etc.
- Using a Legacy Enterprise Customer Community System (Expensive and focused on feedback and customer support only) e.g: PowerReviews, GetSatisfaction etc.
- Setting up a home-grown solution manually and following up over email, slack or telegram with each customer to verify contributions which can be a large drain of time and resources. This is the path most token companies take today.
The problem is that none of these solutions solve for the key challenges for token-based networks, which are: distributing tasks, validating work and distributing rewards.
Our Solution
In order to incentivize community participation, companies will be able to set up a ‘prism’ which can be thought of as a bounty campaign or rewarded task.
When the task is completed, Prism seamlessly verifies completion and reward (token) distribution. This enables current token-holders to increase the value of their investment and the amount of their tokens, and moreover, allows the company to recruit new community members, that might be more averse to make an investment but are willing to contribute their time and help spread the word.
Initial Use-cases
Any task that has an objective output that can quickly be judged valid or invalid is a good candidate for a task via the Prism network.
- Bug bounties, survey responses, and blog posts are all examples of these.
- Longer-term tasks such as code commits, full blown community management and marketing campaigns are also eventual candidates for types of tasks.
Some examples of potential use cases for #1 include.
Product / Feedback / Bug bounties etc.
- Submit a product idea, feature request or bug report.
- Beta test a new feature, submit a feedback survey or perform a usability test to find issues or submit a bug fix.
- Create a poll to gauge community sentiment.
- Write an blog post or review to spread the word.
By starting out focusing on simple tasks, Prism can provide utility for facilitating interactions between projects and their communities.
The longer-term goal is to allow for much more complex and valuable tasks.
Distinguishing Prism.IO from other platforms
Bounty0x.io
Focused on a destination site for searching for bounties. Requires its own token for staking tasks.
Gems.org
Focused on hiring crowdsourced labor of micro-tasks, such as image recognition etc.
Clearpoll.io
Focused primarily on market research, global & political issue related polls.
Earn.com
Focused on micro-tasks as well and outbound email marketing campaigns and airdrops.
Colony.io
Focused on large projects and de-centralized organizations.
Our primary design goal with Prism.IO is simple…
To provide a native experience for projects to host their own polls, contests, surveys, bounty campaigns and other tasks to engage with their communities directly.
To this end we are launching features right out of the gate that include:
White-labeling, CNAME & Design Customization
Keeping a consistent look with the rest of the companies website will be key in establishing trust with users and furthering the sense of community. That’s why Prism IO supports white labeling the look and feel of your community page as well custom CNAME’s to let your page live on your domain.
Native token support
Because its important that your incentives as a project creator are aligned with your community earning rewards, we’ve built support for rewarding your users with your own token without having to adopt a new one.
Our Roadmap
More complex payout support via smart contracts
Some companies will want to be able to automatically reward participants through escrow-like smart contracts to distribute funds immediately without requiring that users submit a with-drawl request.
Support for more complex and on-going tasks
Today Prism IO supports discrete and one-off tasks. In the future, we’ll support various types of tasks that are more complex and on-going.
Governance (tbd)
Could a platform like Prism IO be used to influence the actual day to day work and governance of an organization? e.g: what get’s prioritized, what gets built, who is on the team etc. This is something that is worth exploring further down the line.
Thoughts, Ideas, Suggestions?
Please follow our page here on Medium for updates and apply to Join the Beta from our website.
About the Author
Adam Breckler is the Founder of Prism Labs, makers of Prism.IO
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