Quote from: Dunking Style on March 10, 2014, 10:16:10 AM

Quote from: Alphi on March 10, 2014, 09:54:34 AM

Quote from: ShawnLeary on March 10, 2014, 03:24:07 AM

I think we should steer the focus of karma coin, as an org, away from specific charities. If any owner of Karma wants to support a mission, put together a call for action, like what we are doing for the Girl Scouts, and let the community decide. Garnering support is really the onus of the initial donor. Karmacoin is not a charity, we are a group of charitable people with the same mission. We choose to donate in Karmacoin and not other coins. If a fellow Karminion has a mission and feels it's worthwhile to request back-up, we will be there.

I feel we should definitely focus on equipping the charities themselves with the ability to add "Give Karma" on their websites and educate them to the massive power of crowd sourced micro donations.

The most profound component of Karma is the ability to donate small amounts of money with little to no overhead. We need to sell our mission and technology as a way to capture 10-30% more funds by bringing back those nickel and dime donations that just weren't possible for the last couple decades. Right now there is no way to collect that type of donation due to the cost of mailing a check or physically transporting change. The days of bringing around a March of Dimes can or manning red buckets ringing bells outside of the grocery store are no more.

As we define the mission statement, perhaps, "Empowering the world's charities with the power of Karma."

I will put together an example POA (Plan of Action) for new charities, outlining how they can take advantage of the full utility of Karma and how they might, might, garner the support of fellow karminians to rally around their project.

SL

+ 1

I agree... the core/dev team should focus on making the tools to empower charities to do their own donation drives.
if we get bogged down with trying to police what is legit and what is not then the community and the technology wont be able to progress much.

I'll add a section in my Q&A for charities and how they can use Karma.

Good point there..there are a lot of other things we've got to focus on.
At this point in time though..we really can't afford to have a scam (and negative press coverage) cripple us before we even take off. Doing it right early on will send a message to potential users that our community is serious about doing good, and that every donation received is going to a good cause..not a scammer's pocket. Just imagine..how many people would want to acquire/donate karma coins if the charities were't even legit?

I agree... that is why we should steer well clear of attaching the KarmaCoin cause directly to any other organisation.
Ultimately there is no way to completely prevent fraud and theft.. but if we make it too much effort for the fraudsters then they usually move on to easier targets.
one way to do to that is to make sure that people only donate very small amounts of Karma and make the charities accountable for how the money is spent.. (this can be done quite easily since the blockchain is public)

ultimately I would like to see us have something like a KarmaCoin foundation which acts to guide and educate user to help them avoid being taken for a ride.

one thing we can learn form the fallout Mt Gox fiasco is how a Foundation like the Bitcoin Foundation completely failed in one of their most basic duties, that is to educate users on how to safely use Bitcoins. By not issuing warnings about Mt Gox (because they were too busy trying to cover their own arses) they actually made the situation worse and every alt-coin has suffered as a consequence. We can learn from this and when the time comes that KarmaCoin has its own foundation (separate from the dev team) then that foundation can act as the watchdog to call out potentially high risk charities.