Community Issued Token Ideas

In SteemSpeak's podcast with @ned they brought up the idea of community issued tokens - fascinating. I've taken a few moments to gather my thoughts on where I think the community issued tokens would be most interestingly implemented.

Let's begin with a few sectors:

1. Education
2. Transport
3. Health & Fitness
4. Food

Education

A community that could issue a token 'EDU' might help encourage students to learn and make studying more enjoyable. For example, studying for the GRE/SAT/MCAT/GMAT/LSAT one could be encouraged to continue studying if every time they got a practice question correct or completed a problem set, they were rewarded with some amount of the Steem-based community issued token. As a student, I know that there are very few short term rewards from studying countless hours. This token issued to a community of students would give them short term rewards and hopefully keep them on track for the long term goal of getting the best grade or score possible. And heck, if I could earn while studying I'd probably never leave school.

Transportation

I've written a short piece on decentralizing popular applications like Uber and Lyft - https://steemit.com/steem/@teddyp/decentralizing-popular-apps. Here's another idea: what if a community issued token 'RIDE' was based around the less you used your own car and the more you took public transportation or rode the city bicycles to work the more you were rewarded?

Health & Fitness

Rewarding people for not clocking a large number of miles on their Nike running app, fitbits and other devices, but for running and exercising specifically with groups of people. In other words, the motivation here is not 'the further I run the more I am rewarded' but 'the more friends I run with the more we will be rewarded'. This would probably help stop people exploiting the system by getting in a car and driving a few miles.

Food

Would it not be cool to reward people who bought locally grown food? The closer to the store the food is from the more you are rewarded.

I can think of many more, but I think the most successful community issued tokens will become successful because their goal is to reward the community by getting the community towork together. Studying together with classmates/people in your community, transportation (carpooling) with others to help reduce the CO2 emissions and slow climate change, exercise & fitness to help promote a healthy community are all ways for us, the community, to help ourselves (and Steemit).

Yet, I do think that one of the first most popular and successful community based tokens could be an application that had many games on it (like brick breaker, snake, pong, tetris, etc.) and issued 'GAME' tokens such that you and your friends could compete for the highest score amongst the group of you. The individual with the highest score would be rewarded with tokens and the longer their score was the highest for or the more it was challenged the more tokens the player would accumulate over time. Then how close you are to the application's highest score could increase the amount you are rewarded. Thus, the more attempts at the highest score the more tokens that would be generated.

Cool stuff!

SteemSpeak's podcast with @ned :