Building @steemromania as a prosocial community.

Artwork by @alenthin

What does being prosocial mean?

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I don't know if we have a tendency as human beings of paying more attention to negative things, but in this context, it's clear that antisocial behavior has been studied more than prosocial behavior. The time has come to try to tip the scale to the positive side of the discussion.

Being prosocial refers to different types of behaviors, like cooperating, helping, sharing or trusting. The purest reason for this behavior is altruism, which means offering help without wanting anything in return. But reciprocity is also a common reason and it represents the tendency of offering help knowing that when needed that help would be returned. Other reasons may be those of a moral nature or those that relate to status and image.

Regardless of the reason or form, a prosocial behavior brings benefits to individuals or communities, sometimes with a loose on behalf of the person that acts in this way. Put in a different way, prosociality represents the desire of doing good applied to others or society as a whole.

Because people are social beings and a prosocial behavior transcends the idea of ”I”, we can suppose that all the conscious actions which lead to a collective good, have a prosocial character. Going further with this logic, it becomes apparent that our collective evolution is linked to individual prosocial capabilities.

How does a prosocial community look like?

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A prosocial community is one that is built in such a way that it develops prosocial traits in its members. This structure is fantastic because it creates a general setting that is beneficial to the individual and in turn the individual can act in a way that is beneficial to the community.

Without using pompous words and complicated phrases, it's clear that a community that nurtures in its members traits like cooperation, trust, helping, appreciation or altruism, will grow to be a stronger community.

But, realistically speaking, in a world in which individualism is a cultural norm, initiatives are actively sabotaged, time is rented by money, trust in people is seen as naivety and appreciation is hijacked by worthless values. How can a community oppose these global tendencies and also come up with an alternative?

The good thing is that we don't need everything to change, at least one context in which these principles apply, is a starting point. This is where Steemit comes in.

Steemit in a prosocial context.

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It's no secret that our personal success on this platform is dependent on the success of the platform itself, meaning our collective success. The more value we bring to the collective, the more value can the collective give back, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Although the environment is digital, the community we makeup is still under the laws of human nature. Thus, if we apply the above-mentioned logic, the best and most efficient approach to Steemit is to act in a prosocial manner and reward prosocial actions taken by others.

In this context, we have a perfect alignment between the financial incentives and the social incentives, in building a prosocial community. This rarely happens and it's the first time it happens in the form of a global, open and free platform.

Realistically speaking, the Steemit community has already acted intuitively in a prosocial manner, focusing the discussion on quality. But quality as a term is ever so vague and subjective. An approach to quality through a prosocial mindset can create a framework of analysis in which we can reference quality through the value brought to the community.

Building @steemromania as a prosocial community.

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The Romanian community is about to build together a page to serve as a point of coordination, with the goals of supporting existing members, help new one understand the platform and also bring new people and organizations on the platform. I will try to lay out a possible prosocial approach to this endeavor.

1. Internal Approach

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a) Newcomers

In order to support newcomers and give them the best chances of significantly contributing to the community, we need to have coherent Romanian tutorials explaining the major aspects of the platform.

Because people respond differently to how information is structured, we need to cover the whole range of formats. The same information needs to be put into writing, audio and video formats. Thus individuals can choose the best format in which they can acquire new information.

It's clear that there will still be conversations between older members and new ones, in order to set straight some aspects. But a well structured and coherent presentation of the platform in different formats will same much time and will offer new user autonomy in understanding the different nuances here.

b) Already existing member.

Besides the curation process, which we will discuss shortly, there are different ways we can help existing members in bringing more value to the community.

The most productive thing we can do is to support cooperation. We have the possibility of encouraging and finding ways to support different collaborative efforts in the community. Especially those projects that have a clear goal or an end product.

This specific support for projects can be scaled to the point in which we can run startups or other entrepreneurial activities that also have links with the outside world.

c) The curation process.

Because curation is done manually, there will always be a degree of subjectivity, which is perfectly fine. All we need to do is to add prosocial directions to this subjectivity.

Through curation we have the possibility of rewarding a certain type of content more than another, thus we can encourage some specific directions. Supposing that users will try to produce content which will bring them higher rewards, we can make public certain criteria that will help us determine votes and voting power.

In order to try to find out what is of value on Steemit, we can look at what is valuable for us as humans:

• educational contributions, referring to the sharing of specific knowledge or the teaching of specific skills
• creativity, the arts have a special place in the development of individuals and communities and it's worth searching for these jules
• positivity and humor, a positive mindset helps reduce stress and creates a more productive context
• consistency, in most circumstance for a project to be completed, long-term work is needed
• originality and innovation, these are the qualities that bring forth disruptive change in the world
• personal wisdom, personal experience can bring a lot of value to a community
• the list is open

2. External approach

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For this part, I will dedicate a separate post, because there are a lot of things that need to be analyzed. But as a general strategy, we can concentrate our efforts on bringing to the platform prosocial elements from the outside, like NGO's or causes, educational groups, artists and creatives.

You can also read a post related to this: The Utopian.io model applied to social activism.