Introducing the Steem Business Alliance

This post will briefly present the Steem Business Alliance (SBA) project currently being worked on jointly by @oracle-d, @steempress, @steemhunt, @fundition and @utopian-io. In this post, we want to share our motivation for creating such an organisation, the scope of activities we envision taking on, as well as the work we have already put in over the past months.

As emphasized to a greater extent later in the post, we want to be as transparent as possible with the community and make the most of your ideas and feedback in order to achieve our mission:

Working collectively to attract and build value-adding sustainable businesses on the Steem blockchain.

We are therefore excited to be sharing this first blog post with you!

A brief background

The idea of forming a Steem Businesses Alliance took place during Steemfest 3 in Krakow November 2018. There, our overall takeaway from the talks was that the future of Steem is one primarily centered around the creation of applications and businesses utilizing the blockchain. Considering this vision for Steem, as well as the current state of the blockchain, we agreed that it made sense for us to establish a more tangible form of collaboration to jointly build and share resources, establish and share best practices, as well as joining forces to promote Steem and attract new users, developers businesses and investors.

Following a meeting of @oracle-d, @steempress, @steemhunt, @fundition, @utopian-io and @sndbox in early November, we have since had weekly online meetings to define a vision and mission, scope of activities, organisational structure, as well as preparing a brand and website. We made the decision to keep the working group small initially, to ensure meetings stay focused and productive. Once the organisation is formed, the intention is to allow equal access to any other businesses on the blockchain.

What is the Steem Business Alliance

The SBA will be an organisation for any registered businesses involved in for-profit, sustainable use of the Steem blockchain. It will be a community-driven strategic alliance that shares resources, education and expertise while jointly developing best practice solutions for interested members to adopt. Once a rigid set of practices and a significant resource base is developed, the goal will be to attract new prospective clients and businesses to the Steem blockchain who may benefit from our joint experience.

Motivation

Obviously, the main goal of the SBA is to achieve increased revenues for the members, while contributing positively to increase the value and utility of the STEEM token. The creation of the SBA is therefore motivated mostly by the shared understanding of its founders that by working collectively in this way, we can each benefit. Furthermore, we agree that all of our business can benefit from the individual success of other members. In particular, this would include helping each other succeed with regards to:

Onboarding and retaining new Steemians.
Attracting STEEM investment.
Contributing to a growing and retaining a pool of developer talent.
Helping Steem communities grow.
Marketing and promoting the Steem blockchain.

With all the members relying at least partially on the value of the STEEM token, we thus believe that if we can help each other successfully accomplish these goals independently, all members will benefit and the value of the SBA will be greater than the sum of its parts.

Finally, we observe that many tasks are currently carried out independently by different Steem projects with very little cross-coordination. This results in unnecessary repetition of work and expenditure of time and resources towards solving problems, or creating resources, which are simultaneously being worked on by other projects. The SBA will provide its members with a place to discuss ideas and identify synergies, coordinate efforts and thus reduce repeated work and increase development efficiency.

Scope

We currently have several ideas for the potential scope of the SBA in the long term. We also encourage everyone, especially other Steem-based businesses, to make suggestions as to what the final scope of the SBA ought to be.

Short term

Create and operate a landing Page for Business - A website where any business can see the prospects of building on or integrating Steem (coming soon).
Best Practise & Lessons Learned Sharing.

Medium term

Consult with, onboard and assist new businesses to integrate Steem while providing them valuable exposure to the Steem community.
Contribute to the infrastructure of Steem (Examples may include running a full node, or making joint donations through the proposed Steem DAO).
Intellectual Property sharing that benefits the community

Mid-to-long term

Organise a first SBA conference focused on Steem Business development and investment.
Bring together investors, clients, developers and Steeminans to run Steem blockchain hackerthons which apply blockchain solutions to solve business problems.

Transparency and community feedback

Similar to how we believe that businesses on Steem can benefit from engaging with the community and make use of their feedback and ideas, so too can the Steem Business Alliance itself. Therefore, we intend to share as much detail as possible regarding our plans for what we intend to create, how we want to structure the organisation, as well as why we believe the result will benefit Steem. Throughout the process, we invite the whole community to provide ideas and feedback as well as diligently scrutinize our posts and statements in order to help us improve, hold us to account and ensure a positive outcome for the community.

Concerns & Maintaining Decentralisation

One of the first concerns we have identified when discussing the consequences of a successfully established SBA is the risk of adding centralization to the blockchain. With one of the primary goals being exactly the opposite, to have a new organisation capable of funding and making blockchain development for the community, this is one thing we will try to avoid at all costs. While this concern will only be present in the long term once more members have joined and the combined stake of the SBA becomes significant, we want to discuss this early to ensure it is dealt with properly once relevant. The current agreement is that once the total stake of the SBA exceeds a certain amount (currently agreed as 15m SP) the members shall not run their own witnesses nor cast witness votes. We invite the community to present their opinions on the subject and how the SBA can contribute to increased decentralization of Steem rather than the opposite.