How it works
A quick walk-through — from signing up to helping on your first 2 engagements
Last updated
A quick walk-through — from signing up to helping on your first 2 engagements
Last updated
Meet Jamie — Jamie is our fictional character and helper for the purpose of this demonstration. We will refer to her here and there in the following to make the walk-through a little more descriptive.
To get started on haelp, Jamie simply creates a free account on haelp.org by signing up with her email address.
After she verified her email, we ask Jamie to walk through our onboarding. The onboarding is a guided step-by-step program we have designed to make it as easy as possible for new helpers to get started in the network.
During the onboarding Jamie gets to complete her profile, watches some videos just like this one to understand how the network works and she even makes her first connection with another helper.
Once Jamie completed her onboarding, she unlocks all features of the network and is ready to help!
After completing her onboarding, Jamie switches to her "home" feed.
The home feed is a place where Jamie will be exposed to cells and engagements that match her strengths and which she can potentially interact and help with.
Thanks to some of the information Jamie provided during her onboarding, haelp already did some calculations based on Jamies location and matched her with her first engagements — just like this one here:
"Sign the petition: Berlin 2030 Climate Neutral"
Since Jamie wants to help fight climate change, she opens this engagement by clicking on it.
On the detail page, Jamie learns more about the purpose and mission of this engagement, who is stewarding it and what needs to be done to help accomplish it.
As she fulfills all the requirements for this engagement already (SMI = 100%), she can directly go ahead and start a new activity.
In this case, the activity for this cell consist of 3 steps:
Learn how and where to sign the petiton
Submit a "proof of signature"
Get her proof of signature validated by 1 member of the community
Once Jamie successfully accomplished all 3 steps of this activity, she earns 1 action token for her engagement.
Action Tokens are one of our two alternative currencies that we have created to allow the members of our network to incentivize and reward each other for their helping efforts as well as to build their social capital.
Every time Jamie engages in the network, she gets rewarded with 1 action token which she can collect, use and if she wants to … publicly display on her profile as a “badge” of her achievement.
Let's have a look at another engagement Jamie could help with.
Back on Jamie's home feed, we see that ... we actually see nothing.
Does noone else need Jamie's help? — Not at all! Quite the opposite is actually the case, but the network simply doesn't know about all of Jamie's strengths yet!
And…While being one example of a strength, we are not just talking about Jamie’s arm muscles here 💪🏼😅 — Jamie has a lot more strengths to offer than she might be aware of.
Remember when we were talking about the Action Tokens before? Every time Jamie engages somewhere in the network and earns an action token, she automatically registers another one of her strengths! So whenever someone needs help with something, they can simply create a requirement for each of the strengths they look for in a helper and publish their help request to the network.
Thanks to our specially-designed Strength Match Index every helper who fulfills the requirements a.k.a has the strengths that are needed will get notified about this new help opportunity through their home feed and can then decide whether or no to engage.
So if Jamie now wants to receive and get matched with more help opportunities, she first has to build up some more strengths.
She can mainly choose between 2 different ways to identify what strengths to build:
She can either look through the list of requirements of a cell that she would like to help with. Thanks to the strength match index she can learn what requirements she already fulfills and where she might have to improve. When she clicks on a requirement she does not fulfill yet, she gets taken to the associated cell and there again learns what she'll have to do in order to fulfill it
Cells are the most fundamental and crucial building blocks of our network architecture. Everything you see (and sometimes don't see) is virtually represented by 1 cell in the haelp network — starting from you as the agent to a task like signing a petition even up to digital representations of physical resources.
The reason why we call them "cells" is because just like in nature they have different setups and powers (or "DNAs") and can seamlessly interact and cooperate with each other.
We currently differentiate between 3 overarching categories of cells: Agent-Cells, Host-Cells and Execute-Cells. Agent-Cells are digital representations of each and every one of us (as human users of the haelp network). With haelp being an agent-centric network, we as agents have the super-power to create and steward as well as to connect and join other types of cells.
Every agent in the haelp network can both create (a.k.a be a steward of) and join (a.k.a be a member of) an unlimited number of cells.
Think of cells as "social contracts" — we always have 1-n agents who create and steward the contract by defining its purpose and scope of existence as well as the requirements (e.g. being a resident of a certain country or having signed another specific contract before) and actions (such as signing the contract) other agents have to comply with in order to become a member and thereby beneficiary of whatever that contract gives them the right to. Just as with other contracts, either party may choose to withdraw from the rights (and obligations) of that contract.
If Jamie wouldn't build up more strengths through activities such as joining communities, engaging on projects and acquiring skills, haelp would be a really "quiet" network — and that is intentional!
Per default, your home feed will only show the cells where your strengths match 100% — hence if you don't feed the network with information about your strengths, you won't see anything appear on your home feed ever!
If however you were to explore the haelp network beyond your home feed, there are currently 3 different ways for you to go about that:
If you decided to explore the haelp network on the lookout for some new opportunities to help and connect with other agents around shared purpose, you can create your own perspectives of the network.
Perspectives allow you to make sense out of the network in the way that works best for you! Think of perspectives as "custom feed" or "saved search queries".
With perspectives we want to allow agents for as much freedom and degree of customization as possible.
Perspectives you live on both agent-level as well as cell-level.
The third way to explore new cells to engage with is through the so-called trust connections.
A trust connection is the connection (or "bond") 2 different cells can establish with each other — other in a one-way or a two-way a.k.a mutual trust relationship.
Think of a trust connection as a "friendship" between 2 cells that simply "vouch" for each other and thereby say: "Yep, I endorse what this other cell stands for!".
Let's have a look at an example: Say you are stewarding the community "Petitions in Berlin" and your purpose is to curate all kinds of local petitions in Berlin, you are going to want to endorse / feature / entrust all kinds of petitions that are happening in Berlin. So when a new local petition gets added to the network, it starts off with 0 reputation and trust — and with every trust connection establish that cell gains a better reputation. You decide which cells you want to establish trust between.
Now: the cool thing about trust connections is that they are not hierarchies! That means that whenever you entrust a new cell, that cell will still remain "independent" as a holon (see hint above) and doesn't get "nested" into your cell so that only members of your community-cell can see it. Think of trust connections as "promotions", "features" or "endorsements" which are abundant and non-exclusive. And same as with contracts: trust connections can be temrinated by either party at any time.
Another cool thing about the trust connections is that they allow agents to make sense out of things (a.k.a the network) the way they like! As different people define things differently, trust connections allow you to create perspectives that are especially meaningful and/or safe in whatever way you define "meaningfulness" and "safety". You only want to be exposed to discussions that are endorsed by the community "Against Hate-Speech"? Go for it! You only want to see and follow tasks that are published by a friend? Easy as pie! You want to combine both? Done!
Jamie has found a translation task that she'd like to help with — but her Strength-Match-Index is only at 50%. When she looks into the details of the task-cell, she learns that this task requires some language skills she doesn't have yet. To be more precise: it requires german-language skills at a level of C2 as defined by kevin who is stewarding the skill-cell associated with this requirement.
Since Jamie is fluent in German, she takes a closer look at the definition of the skill to see what the associated activity looks like and what she would need to do in order to be recognized and join this skill as a member — to ultimately meet all requirements the translation task she wants to help with.
This means: if you were to acquire a skill (a.k.a join a skill-cell as a member), you'd have to look out for a membrane-cell you're eligible to take. So in Jamies example, she gets to choose between "Enter w/ a Goethe Certificate" or "Enter w/ Test Results from Berlitz". She quickly reads into the descriptions and activities of both, and learns that her best way to proof her German language skills will be through submitting test results from Berlitz as they offer a free language skill assessment test Jamie can take right away.
Once Jamie obtained the test results, she can start a new activity and walk through the actions kevin has defined in order to proof and validate her eligibility for a membership in the skill-cell "German C2".
As soon as Jamie has earned the action token from the skill-cell "German C2", she can go back to her translation-task where she has now become eligible to help and start a new activity there.
All the cells in the haelp network are evaluated and weighted according to a couple of metrics that help you better navigate and prioritize your interactions based on your liking:
The entire community of the haelp network can vote on which engagement is more important or more highly valued from their point of view in each context.
As mentioned earlier, Action Tokens (short: AT) are only 1 of the 2 alternative currencies we are using across the network to incentivize and reward helpers for their actions on haelp. The second one is called haelp coin (short: HPC).
haelp coins are created by every agents themselves and their basic unit of value is 1-hour of time. So for every hour Jamie is part of the network, she is credited with 1 haelp coin — without having to do anything for it! This is also called an “Unconditional Basic Income”, or short: UBI.
Other than action tokens, haelp coins are not bound to an individual agent forever. Instead, they can freely float across the network and be exchanged between agents — and because of this special property, haelp coins are particularly suitable for enabling the community to incentivize and express how important accomplishing the purpose of a particular cell is to them.
As an example, Jamie could create a task where she asks for help to “Translate my resumée into German”. In addition to the action token she automatically offers, she can decide to offer 3 haelp coins out of her own wallet as a reward to the agent(s) who help her accomplish the task.
And not only Jamie as steward of the cell can do this: every other agent in the network who sees her task-cell has the possibility to add their own haelp coins as well to increase the incentive to accomplish it. This feature gets especially interesting if you think of tasks or projects that benefit an entire group or community of people, such as for a local clean up, the maintenance of a community garden or the organization of a petition.
The more haelp coins are added to a cell, the more urgent and valuable the community considers the achievement of that cell.
Once a cell has been accomplished, all the rewards that have been added to that cell by the community get equally distributed among all member-agents.
Some cells will deal with time-sensitive matters and will therefor be bound to a start- and/or end-date which determine the period of time in which agents across the network can interact with it.
Besides the rather "hard criteria" for selecting and prioritizing cells, you can of course always just read into the public descriptions of the cells that are created by the stewards. These usually give you a good impression of what a cell stands for and what its mission and purpose is to help you find out if you align.
Perhaps the greatest problem we face is not climate change [or the 17 SDGs], but the myth of our own powerlessness.
So far we have looked at 2 examples of collaboration: the petition-task that could probably best be assigned to the field of "activism" and the translation-task that could be described as a peer-to-peer service.
Whether we are living or working together as a family or organization — with haelp we offer a "meta-platform" and "home" for any style and scope of social collaboration which is only limited by our imagination.
With haelp we are inviting everyone to join us on a collective journey where we develop and test new ways of organizing and coordinating our economy and society based on values such as solidarity, self-organization, transparency, inclusion, diversity, regeneration, freedom and peace.
We aim to utilize our "discoveries" to inspire and educate policymakers, as well as to broaden the perspectives of communities across the globe, by showcasing a novel development path for our collective future. Our mission is to create a future where economic and financial crises no longer jeopardize the livelihoods of people, but instead, technological progress is harnessed to secure them unconditionally. I envision a future where technologies are not designed for the profit of a few, but instead, are developed to empower people to live more fulfilling and liberated lives. A future where the values of a society are not based on the logic of money and exploitation, but rather on nurturing new ideas and experiences. A future where life is not lived at the expense of future generations and where equilibrium with the planet is maintained while ensuring that there is enough for everyone. I aspire to live in a future where progress is not measured by what we possess, but rather by who we are as individuals.
Soulbound tokens refer to digital identity tokens that represent the characteristics or reputation of a person. The term was first introduced and proposed in a paper titled “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul" written by , Ethereum’s co-founder, along with Puja Ohlhaver, strategy counsel at FlashBots, and E. Glen Weyl, political economist and social technologist. Learn more about SBTs on
For this reason, we at haelp have been incorporating the topics of decentralized technology from the very beginning to bring our network there as soon as those technologies are mature and stable enough to serve us all according to our core values of self-sovereignty and freedom. If you want to go a little bit deeper in that topic, feel free to check out our ""
The other way to go about building strengths is to simply browse a custom perspective according to her definition. You will learn more about "" in a bit.
As an alternative (or "antidote") to the mainstream social networks, we have intentionally designed haelp to be a "" — this simply means that you will only see and be exposed to what you allow the network to display.
The search feature is probably the easiest and most straight-forward way to explore the network — if you know what you're searching for. You can currently search by entering a cell's titel or slug. If however you don't know the exact cell you're looking for, you'll probably be better off by creating a custom network .
Perspectives are particular views of the network that you get to define — such as: what types of cells shall be included in your perspective (e.g. skills, resources, agents, discussions, ...), what status those cells should be in, who is stewarding them and even what other cells are entrusting them. You will learn more about "" in a bit.
Trust connections are really important to make sense in a that builds on self-organization and where hierarchies don't really exists.
We have founded haelp on strong values such as solidarity, transparency, inclusion, diversity, freedom and peace which guide every decision we take regarding the creation of our network. Feel free to read more about our and .
For every execute-cell you will have your personal SMI to see if you're eligible to interact with it and thereby "unleash its power". (You can learn more about the different DNAs and "super-powers" of each cell type .)
If you have a closer look at the DNA of a you will notice that a skill-cell can, among other cell types, host so-called "membrane-cells" — membrane-cells are in the cell category of execute-cells and have the special power to "bring outside cells to the inside of their primary trust cell". Now remember: when we are talking about "outside" and "inside" we are not talking about the literal meaning of these words as in hierarchical system. If you recall the cell-analogy of "social contracts" from earlier, you can think of membrane-cells as the different "gateways" for agents to sign the social contract a.k.a become member and beneficiaries of the cell.
Learn more about the benefits of our dual-currency system in
Note: Not every cell-type can accept and hold haelp coin rewards. To learn more about the different cell types and their DNAs, hop over to
Feel free to start reading into our to learn more about the concept of cells and how they work.
