This week Sndbox have asked the cohort to consider how we could utilise Smart Media Tokens, otherwise known as SMTs to support our online communities and activities.

What is an SMT?

Simply put, a Smart Media Token (SMT) is a custom token (or digital currency coin) run off the back of the Steem blockchain. SMTs offer individuals and organisations the opportunity to launch a token to monetise and fund their content and communities. SMTs reward the community for proof-of-brain type work, with up-votes and likes determining the highest quality content, as seen on Steem.

Although the SMT whitepaper is available, the feature itself will not be live until 2019. Until this time we can only speculate about the power and opportunity SMTs may have.

This next section is purely hypothetical (for now at least!)

Introducing the CritDay Coin

The aptly named CritDay Coin would incentivise the promotion of architectural education. CritDay Coin would reward students, universities and individuals who positively and actively celebrate their architectural journey, sharing their processes and experiences. Sharing within architectural education is key to allow the development of teaching, learning and the industry as a whole. It is vital for students to explore outside the four walls of their studio, and learn from others.

Integrating SMTs into the CritDay platform would provide an incentive through rewarding contributors with CritDay Coin tokens. As discussed in my recent post why all architecture students should be using steemit, traditional social media platforms provide little incentive to post, limited to just likes and comments. Blockchain technology, namely Steem and the associated SMTs, enable value based rewards.

CritDay Coin would encourage international discussion and collaboration. Architects are trained all over the world, as such the method and techniques of architectural education vary between countries. For example, students in the UK are taught different processes and techniques to those in Malaysia, but information on this is not readily available. CritDay Coin would support global interaction, where a student from India could share their design process with American students and visa-versa, all visible on one platform.

Precedent

Steemhunt is a Steem powered community who share new products and innovations. Each day new products are found by users and posted to the site. These posts are then rated up (or down) by other users to determine the best finds of the day. Top finds are then rewarded with Steem.

CritDay could work in a similar way. Each day CritDay receives hundreds of submissions of student work, sadly these cannot all be posted to the Instagram feed. However, if students could upload their work directly and the community could rate the best models, visuals and drawings, like products on Steemhunt. The top posts of that day could then be awarded CritDay Coin.

This process would decentralise the decision making process that currently exists, where I determine if a post is featured or not, why not let the CritDay community decide…?

More information on SMTs can be found here:
Steem – SMTs
SMT Whitepaper
Smart Media Tokens at a Glance

This post is part of the Sndbox Weekly Question Series.