SPADES Community is the culmination of years of work towards a platform that would give access to the developing world in some manner by which they can enter the global digital marketplace.
The “Free Digital Universe” (FDU), pictured above from 2008 on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, was the original design. I thought it might be of interest to share a bit of that history with you, as 2008 was a totally different time. If you find this history of interest, you can explore further by visiting the old site here.
Disguised as a game.
In 2008, before cryptocurrencies, we were unsure what the reaction would be to openly offering a global digital currency with some ideas that lead to new economic models. This idea went beyond the industrial age concept of the nation state, introducing an information age, global digital community (digital nation that was not a “state”) transcending national boundaries.
For those old enough to remember, back in 2008, virtual world games like Second Life, or Entropia Universe, were places with their own digital economies. We decided that the FDU could be released as a virtual game.
FDU economic model.
One purpose of the FDU design was to provide a comprehensive Information Age economic model that sustainably addresses extreme global poverty, over-use of natural resources, and unequal compensation in a globalized world. Our Game was designed to improve the human and planetary condition by supporting humanitarian partners with the capacity to resolve issues related to lack of basic resources in health care, education, jobs, fair wages, food, water, and shelter.
If we trace the causes of poverty, the above-mentioned issues, and of environmental degradation on a planetary scale, we will find they all have a common root-cause, the Industrial Age economic model. The FDU was designed to test a Information Age economic model.
Game Concept.
The Free Digital Universe (FDU) was being implemented as a virtual game with a multitude of earning and social options, players would use “Digital Soules” as Avatars who collect Life Force Points, those points would be used for barter and backing of local community currencies. Avatars collected Life Force Points in a variety of ways, including:
- Sharing in ad revenue
- Digital publishing – shoot a lion video instead of a lion.
- Affiliate marketing
- Auctions and stores
- Games
- Jobs
SPADES Community has picked up where this started, the technology was prohibitively expensive to accomplish this and code it all ourselves in 2008. Plus today, there are cryptocurrencies and they are widely accepted.
Charitable Integration: Peace Portal
Soule Families.
Each new Avatar Soule entering the FDU Game was to choose a charitable “Soule Family” from which their unique Avatar Soule derived. As a Avatar increases in Life Force Points from actions in FDU, a part was to be donated to a charity associated with their Soule Family. In this way, each Player Soule automatically helps to fund charities of interest to each unique Player.
A Soule Family was to be chosen by the Avatar from the following sectors: Education, Health Care, Economics, Environment, Children, Technology, Food Security, Job Training, Interfaith Organizations, and Cultural.
In some instances, a new Avatar Soule would be automatically placed into a Soule Family, this happened when a charitable partner acting as an approved Soule Family Admin would directly refer new users as a fund-raising option for their organization.
Peace Portal Solutions.
Peace Portal, as the charitable action arm of FDU, was dedicated to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Over 100 solutions were collected in our knowledge library, you can still explore them here (and perhaps we will repost some in SPADES).
SPADES Community has taken a different approach to funding charitable and non-profit organizations, we created a crypto token (the SPADES TRC20 Token) and have allocated 10% (100 Million Tokens) for release over a 20-year period.
Members of the SPADES Community will nominate, and then vote on the winner of our bi-monthly charitable awards.
Unfortunately, the Peace Portal was built so long ago, in Joomla actually, that many of the protocols upon which it was built are no longer supported. The main one being Adobe Flash Player. It’s too bad you can’t see the Youth Ambassador interviews with Michael Franti, or Joan Baez. The good news is that the SPADES Community is working to revive the best of the Peace Portal.
Here is a little walk-through video made in June of 2009.
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