KARMA

Karma is a bold initiative which leverages the power of decentralization and blockchain technology to empower membership-based organizations around the world.

“Every action we take generates a force of energy that returns to us in kind. When we consciously choose actions that bring happiness and success to others, the fruit of our karma is happiness and success.” — Deepak Chopra

Our slogan perfectly sets forth Karma’s vision: World’s First Decentralized Smart Community Network. This is considerably more than just a slogan for us, but rather the basis for all our combined efforts. Our mission is to become the core provider of such tools — empowering communities of all shapes and sizes and allowing them to scale new heights. All this while providing them with support and incentives along the way. The blockchain capabilities of the Karma Protocol and, more specifically, the Karma International Token (KIT), lay the foundation of all of these efforts: allowing organizations to launch, manage, build and operate on Karma and ensuring a thriving, sustainable and diverse module and support ecosystem. Karma also seamlessly integrates best of breed offchain technologies to provide a completely optimized and modularized solution. This white paper describes what Karma is under the hood, how it will be brought to life by our team, and our vision and approach for bringing Karma into the world.

Terminology and Acronyms

The Challenge

Spinning up a new Community Network is a considerable challenge. Organizations across the world seeking to do so face numerous difficulties selecting the right technologies and solutions, and after that selecting the right development partners in order to implement those choices. Even if these initial selections are appropriate, actually implementing, operating and maintaining the resulting Community Network can be fraught with complications.

Established organizations, with their Legacy Community Networks (i.e., networks and systems based on older, non-blockchain technologies), face similar and additional difficult challenges. These organizations’ Legacy Community Networks are often a diverse mix of incompatible technologies (different vendors, versions, protocols, ages, interfaces, etc.). Grafting on newer components, even if those components, considered in isolation, are the right choice, can be combinatorially difficult. Bottom line — as growing organizations scale their operations, their Legacy Community Networks simply cannot keep up.

Karma International faced this issue itself. Established in 2005, Karma International had the original mission of connecting exceptional and inspirational individuals both socially and professionally through a variety of high profile experiential events, business networking summits, social gatherings, and international excursions. Karma International was very successful with this tightly focused business model. Over the next several years Karma International built and evolved its own Community Network,

often in response to pressing and immediate requirements. Karma International’s ever increasing growth and the vast expansion of its model to that of a true membership organization eventually rendered this approach unsustainable.

Each Module will offer its own features and benefits. The modules come in two varieties: Core Modules and Custom Modules. These are described in more detail below.

Core module

will provide a number of basic Modules (as presented in “Key Features & Capabilities”) that will provide the Community Network with the core features that most organizations require. The Core Module is provided, maintained and updated by Karma.

Custom Modules

The Custom Module provides useful functionality beyond what the Core Module offers. They are developed by Karma Community Developers and then submitted to the Marketplace for review, feedback and approval by Karma.

The Karma Solution

In 2014 Karma International took the initiative and resolved to develop a new internal platform, what ultimately became the Karma Member Lounge (KML). The KML was designed from the ground up to have the capacity to power and manage all aspects of Karma International’s expanded and anticipated business models. The KML has become a powerful and multi-faceted platform which has benefited from many years of industry experience, significant investment, R&D, and focused and organized software development efforts. The KML has been a true labor of love for Karma International and fulfills its mandate of providing its members with the best possible experience.

Karma International has been and will always be focused on providing value back to the community, towards those organizations most in need. It has contributed to hundreds of nonprofit efforts over the years and is directly involved in charitable and community efforts. Our new offering, Karma, continues and massively scales this vision, representing the distributed, blockchain technology based, tokenized, secured and scalable reimagining of the original KML — made available to any membership-based organization.

Karma will also enable organization-to-organization (and organization to Community Developer) communications, financial management, donating and voting. This will create opportunities and create value on an unprecedented scale. As more and more organizations and Community Developers adopt Karma, the value proposition of the platform (and the related KIT token) will itself increase due to the network effect. Karma will be adaptable and extensible, meaning that it can be tailored to the diverse and evolving needs of membership organizations worldwide. In order to achieve success at velocity, we will leverage:

The knowledge we have gained from building, operating and managing a highly successful community network (KML).
The expertise and skills of our blockchain development team.
The guidance of our advisors, and
The valued input of the growing Karma Community.

The Marketplace

Marketplaces with the Custom Modules option will be one of the most effective ways to increase added value in Karma through Community Developers. These user module samples will be fully capable of consuming KIT based on their own unique needs, individually supporting indicators based on each module instance. Karma will allow all community developers to create highly specific self-processing modules. They can take one or more roles to benefit all our Community in various tech industries.

By using Ethereum as an abstract base layer, Karma can apply all the functions and rules of the KIT protocol directly into the intelligent contracts used and processed by the entire network. Using the entire Ethereuminfrastructure to examine transactions and add new blocks to the block chain, Karma minimizes the possibility of attacks against the protocol.

At the top of the Etherium, Karma builds services using Geth. Geth is a multipurpose command line tool running a complete Ethereal node that is implemented in Go. In this case, the Linux server runs on its own Linux server without opening the RPC / HTTP port. Communication where Geth participates is managed through the medium Python app and the Ethereum network. Competition.

Playing a new community network is a serious problem. Organizations around the world are trying to do this in the face of many difficulties in choosing the right technology and solutions, and then selecting the right development partners to carry out this election. While this initial election is appropriate, the actual implementation, operation and maintenance of the final community network may be complicated. Established organizations with their Legacy networking networks (eg networks and systems based on old and non-blocking technologies), face similar and additional challenges. Outdated network networks from these organizations often represent incompatible technologies (vendors, versions, protocols, ages, interfaces, etc.). New component vaccinations, although these components, which are considered isolated, are the right choice, can be a difficult combinatorial. The bottom line — as organizations grow on their scale of operation, their Legacy Community Network can not keep up with the times.