KARMA-World’s First Decentralized Smart Community Network

- Januari 18, 2018

Given the era of decentralization, Karma’s new mission is to provide the Karma Protocol and Karma International Token (KIT) to empower membership-based communities around the world, including:

Physical membership organizations (such as country or golf clubs)
Virtual membership organizations (such as university alumni chapters)
Non-profit organizations which lack the operational backbone (CRM, ERP, Analytics, etc.)

Established in 2005, Karma had the original mission of connecting exceptional and inspirational individuals both socially and professionally through a variety of high profile experiential events, business networking summits, social gatherings, and international excursions.

Karma

Karma is a bold initiative which leverages the power of decentralization and blockchain technology to empower membership-based organizations around the world.

Our slogan perfectly sets forth Karma’s vision: World’s First Decentralized Smart Community Network. This is considerably more than just a slogan for us, but rather the basis for all our combined efforts. Our mission is to become the core provider of such tools — empowering communities of all shapes and sizes and allowing them to scale new heights. All this while providing them with support and incentives along the way. The blockchain capabilities of the Karma Protocol and, more specifically, the Karma International Token (KIT), lay the foundation of all of these efforts: allowing organizations to launch, manage, build and operate on Karma and ensuring a thriving, sustainable and

diverse module and support ecosystem. Karma also seamlessly integrates best of breed offchain technologies to provide a completely optimized and modularized solution. This white paper describes what Karma is under the hood, how it will be brought to life by our team, and our vision and approach for bringing Karma into the world.

The Challenge

Spinning up a new Community Network is a considerable challenge. Organizations across the world seeking to do so face numerous difficulties selecting the right technologies and solutions, and after that selecting the right development partners in order to implement those choices. Even if these initial selections are appropriate, actually implementing, operating and maintaining the resulting Community Network can be fraught with complications.

Established organizations, with their Legacy Community Networks (i.e., networks and systems based on older, non-blockchain technologies), face similar and additional difficult challenges. These organizations’ Legacy Community Networks are often a diverse mix of incompatible technologies (different vendors, versions, protocols, ages, interfaces, etc.). Grafting on newer components, even if those components, considered in isolation, are the right choice, can be combinatorially difficult. Bottom line — as growing organizations scale their operations, their Legacy Community Networks

simply cannot keep up.

Karma International faced this issue itself. Established in 2005, Karma International had the original mission of connecting exceptional and inspirational individuals both socially and professionally through a variety of high profile experiential events, business networking summits, social gatherings, and international excursions. Karma International was very successful with this tightly focused business model. Over the next several years Karma International built and evolved its own Community Network, often in response to pressing and immediate requirements. Karma International’s ever increasing growth and the vast expansion of its model to that of a true membership organization eventually rendered this approach unsustainable.

The Karma Solution

In 2014 Karma International took the initiative and resolved to develop a new internal platform, what ultimately became the Karma Member Lounge (KML). The KML was designed from the ground up to have the capacity to power and manage all aspects of Karma International’s expanded and anticipated business models. The KML has become a powerful and multi-faceted platform which has benefited from many years of industry experience, significant investment, R&D, and focused and organized software development efforts. The KML has been a true labor of love for Karma International and fulfills its mandate of providing its members with the best possible experience.

Karma International has been and will always be focused on providing value back to the community, towards those organizations most in need. It has contributed to hundreds of nonprofit efforts over the years and is directly involved in charitable and community efforts. Our new offering, Karma, continues and massively scales this vision, representing the distributed, blockchain technology based, tokenized, secured and scalable reimagining of the original KML — made available to any membership-based organization.

Karma will also enable organization-to-organization (and organization to Community Developer) communications, financial management, donating and voting. This will create opportunities and create value on an unprecedented scale. As more and more organizations and Community Developers adopt Karma, the value proposition of the platform (and the related KIT token) will itself increase due to the network effect. Karma will be adaptable and extensible, meaning that it can be tailored to the diverse and evolving needs of membership organizations worldwide. In order to achieve success at velocity, we will leverage:

The knowledge we have gained from building, operating and managing a highly successful community network (KML).
The expertise and skills of our blockchain development team.
The guidance of our advisors, and
The valued input of the growing Karma Community.

Karma Market Place

The Marketplace includes the functionality which rewards Community

Developers with KIT when their Custom Modules are purchased and/or
utilized. This will produce a positive dynamic which will drive innovation

on Karma.

The Marketplace, with its selection of Custom Modules, will be one of the most effective methods to increase the value added to Karma through Community Developers. Instances of these Custom Modules will be fully capable of consuming KIT based on their own unique requirements, individually maintaining metrics on a per Module instance basis.
We will allow all Community Developers to create highly specific, self-contained processing Modules. These can take one or multiple roles for the benefit of all of our Communities, across very diverse industries.

Module Admission

The Token Holder Community will be responsible for accepting any new or updated Modules within its network, based on the Consensus mechanism enforce by the DAO. Quality, performance and reliability guidelines will be enforced for any new admission, to ensure the Marketplace is only composed of excellent modules.

Module Management

Community Developers will have the ability to define exactly how their KIT-based pricing works. This promotes a healthy, self-regulated application eco-system where high-quality modules will be able to build a sustainable business model. Acquisition Costs will be subsidized, using Consensus, from the initial TGE allocation for Research & Development, providing most of our capabilities at no cost for Communities. Example:

Alice creates a Community Developer Module that offers newsletter capabilities
Alice applies for Marketplace approval and sets her acquisition costs as 2000 KIT
The new module is tested and vetted by our automated systems
The module is validated by a manual review team
Once approved using consensus, her module is available for any community to install
Communities acquiring the module can benefit from subsidized acquisition costs during the first development stages of the platform
Alice receives 2000 KIT per installation.