Rovas beta 2 released
The new version of the application brings some major changes:
1. User verification functionality was removed, because it is a hard to inplement the concept and it seems "philosophically" unnecessary as well. The primary function of Rovas is to record and reward work, regardless of whether performed by a human or a sentient machine (one that can fill work reports, desires Merits and can itself use Chrons). This choice of course brings a new set of challenges, that require the next major function in this release...
2. Proof of labor. In the new version, every work report filled must be approved by two other NEO participants (verifiers), for Chrons to be made available to the reporting worker. Verifiers are rewarded with Merits for their verification work by the work report authors.
3. If a work report is found invalid, Rovas lowers value of a new field of the report author profile - the "Compliance score" - by one. For every three negative points the user is penalized by subtracting 10 Merits from his/her account. Valid reports increase the score by one, so user who in the past accumulated - say - 6 negative points and 20 Merits in penalties can erase the negative score and have the Merits reinstated, if his/her subsequent 6 work reports are found valid. Positive Compliance score does not result in adding Merits to the user's balance.
4. Additional new features: In addition to work reports and projects, also individual Verifications can be disputed (contested in the NEO "court"). For every three lost verification disputes, their author is penalized by lowering his/her Compliance score.
5. The proof of labor together with the penalization functions are in place to prevent the NEO economy participants from filing false reports and indirectly to fight creation of false accounts.
6. Redesigned Reports page contains powerful filtering, allowing users to quickly find for example unverified work reports that they might want to verify.
Help with testing is welcome. Testers can participate in sharing the Merit rewards from the Rovas project. Please contact the project owner when interested in helping out.
The next steps
The Rovas application will be tested for any bugs, usability and overall functionality issues. In the meantime a basic API will be developed that will allow third-party applications to interface with Rovas. The first application the API will be tested with will be the existing, but redesigned x-country skiing portal nabezky.sk, which will be transformed into an universal outdoor sports portal (cycling and x-country skiing initially).
Once this is complete sometimes in the fall, another application will be developed, that will allow anybody to buy or sell their national currency for Chrons - either by participating in an auction organized in the app, or directly by paying a known exchange rate (plus a fee) to a "forex company" running this web application.