All About OpenZen Project

OpenZen Release

General description of the document

This document describes the main principles of the system Zen, problems that are being solved, functions of the programme, a road map of the project, a proposal for Pre ICO and ICO.

The architecture of the application and the materials that are being used for preparation are also briefly introduced.

What is Zen?
Zen is a desktop application which is an alternative to well-known browsers and to the concept of a ‘web’ as a whole.

Zen is a semi closed decentralised distributed social network, a search engine and a storage of information, where information is being created, updated and consumed directly by the users of the system.

The main idea of the project is that the content (text, audio, photo, video) is distributed between the participants of the network using a p2p (f2f) model with the technologies of a distributed storage IPFS.

Zen is meant to become a new way of spending time in the Internet. The system uses a cryptocurrency ZenToken as a means of exchange, payments, voting and games.
Zen is a decentralized network, influence of servers is minimized and in the future it will be completely eliminated.

We are creating the clean Internet where one can find everything he or she needs: friends, mail, calls, cinema, games, articles and much more.

Problem overview
What’s the idea: the application Zen is being developed in order to solve a number of systematic problems of the Internet, make people’s life easier. What kinds of problems does Zen solve? Which problems became the reasons to create this project?

In the process of life and activity in the online space we faced a number of problems which are not being solved now and cause more and more harm with every year.

A typical person deals with a great deal of electronic information, and it can be overwhelming to keep track of it all. The problems that people have in interacting with large amounts of information are well documented.

In 1988 Lansdale outlined some of “the problems of classification and the role of memory” in information organization—in other words, the problems of storing and retrieving information. Lansdale states that the main problem with information organization is that humans have too limited memory to remember exactly where they file every piece of information, either in the physical world or on their computers. Instead, people remember certain pieces of their organization, such as visual cues or dates, and rely on these pieces to help guide them to the information they need. Unfortunately, existing information organization tools are not tailored to the aspects of electronic information that people recall easily when locating information.

Web is like an ocean of information. There is so much of it that it’s difficult to even imagine. But the majority of this information is just a waste rock. Only a small part of it is really valuable.

Web is a plant for the production of informational noise and garbage.

It’s all this advertising, registration, enormous amount of low-quality information. Also it's the constant e-mail spam, notifications from hundreds of internet services where you once left your data. Not to mention one-type internet services and millions of web sites.

It’s all called informational noise, some people call it informational garbage. It reaches us as soon as we open the browser.
Informational garbage
Google and other search services give us millions of websites on our request. They offer a wide variety of websites where information is repeated or is no longer relevant or is unchecked which can mislead people. The user either spends a lot of time clicking on every link or checks just the first few ones. But the quality of that optimised information can be poor and may not correspond to our expectations.
Informational noise and information overload
Due to advertisements, marketing, search engine optimisation, SMM and other things, our heads are full of unwanted information. Sometimes we don’t notice it because we already got used to poking around all this garbage.

Why does it happen? People who create similar repeated information and those who distribute it don’t think about informational ecology, they only think about their profit. Informational pollution as well as ecological influences our psycho-emotional and mental health.

Users need to monitor many social networks, messengers, thematic websites and forums. Information channel of a person gets full of advertising and marketing messages. Because of information overload and informational noise emotional wellbeing of a person worsens affecting their health and productivity. Valuable time of everyone’s life is wasted.

A lot of online similar services
The Internet industry is a big vacuum cleaner to collect money. We use one service and we pay for it. Then we use another service and again we pay. We can agree that they improve the quality of our lives but why don’t we create a single universal service and pay it for a set of different functions. As an example imagine a swiss knife.

That’s what we aim to do. But we are going even further. Since the system is decentralised and we don’t have significant expenditure on hardware support and stuf maintaining it. It means that our users don’t pay for it.

Excess of UI and variety
The UI of websites are so diverse that sometimes you want everyone to have a single user-friendly interface for everything, so that it would not be necessary to get used to every new design of websites and try to understand how to work with it. The problem is that sometimes interfaces of websites are really confusing.

Personalised Internet
Websites and services are not always personalized. The authors of web projects choose functionality of their websites and very often it is impossible to reject some functions. This limits and worsens a user’s work..

Example 1: try to refuse from Histories in messengers or from offers to place ads on facebook. You cannot do that. Also it is impossible to customize the design and functions for yourself.

Advertising
Advertising is one of the massive sources of informational noise. A lot of websites put advertisements wherever it is possible and the Internet is a huge advertising platform. Mainly because of it the Internet is becoming to look like a dustbin.

Crisis of trust in information
One cannot trust everything that is written in the Internet. Fakes news are everywhere. What’s the reason of them spreading so fast? It’s the lack of responsibility of the authors. Everyone can post fake news. And thus the trust to information is being constantly reduced. One can buy reputation or rating in the Internet.

Note: as for Zen, it monitors publications of fake news. If someone gives fake news and it is confirmed, then the rating of the publisher lowers. Would you now try to catch a major mass media and lower its rating?

Reputation is an asset of the 21st century. It’s a mechanism of increasing responsibility. It cannot be bought or sold. One can only earn it doing socially useful actions or spend it. In the current web it is impossible.

Parental supervision
Equal access to getting assets
Current algorithms of reaching consensus PoW and PoS separate the society. They give advantages to some people but deprive others of them. Mining farms deprive people of equal opportunities to obtain cryptocurrency, tokens and assets. There is no healthy competition, ordinary users have no access to the issue of cryptocurrency. But current competition - competition in computational powers,- is not beneficial for people and the world. It’s just consumption of electricity. While computational power itself can benefit people and science.

Our idea is to give participants a mechanism of obtaining assets/cryptocurrency through their productive and useful activities such as creating, correcting and updating information created by people.


Note: each of the following issues can be discussed infinitely long, we are glad to talk about it. The problems are described very briefly. For more information please contact ilya.druzhinin@protonmail.ch or use references to this document.

Mission Statement
Our mission is to give the users of the Internet the instrument to make life easier. This instrument will allow them to save their priceless time of life. Zen is a new milestone in the development of the Internet that will reduce the amount of informational noise and informational pollution.

Our mission is to reduce the role of advertising as means of getting profit. In our opinion it is the main reason if informational pollution. In the pursuit of advertising the business does not act in the interests of ordinary people, more and more manipulating their weaknesses, desires and pains.

Developing Zen we completely realise that Zen cannot belong to a limited number of people who will use it to increase only their own capital and material prosperity.

Our mission is to create an ecosystem for honest, fair and responsible people.

Our mission is to create an autonomous and smart society.
Core Objectives
Create an application that will be an alternative to web browsers, that will combine all the main user scenarios in the Internet: communication, search and creation of information, entertainment.
Reduce information overload of people, make their life easier in the period of information age.
Make the application decentralised, independent from material interests of a limited number of people.
Reward users for socially useful actions. Any activity aiming to collect and organise knowledge should be rewarded as well as any socially useful action.
Reduce negative influence of unscrupulous people, organisations and information. Any negative and destructive action should have an effect on life of its initiator lowering his or her social status and reputation.
Give people equal opportunities for personal development. All the people are equal and if someone has less resources than the other, it should not matter if the person wants to develop.
How does it work?
Note: Main ideas of the application.
Expert network
We introduce a system of competencies for the establishment of an expert network. The expert system is based on so-called "collective intelligence".

The principle of operation of the expert network
While spending time in the Internet a person visits websites and forums in accordance with his or her interests. This way a semantic kernel of their interests is created.

The system of competencies is developed together with the person. The more he is active in this system and the more positive reviews he gets from people with the same semantic kernel of competencies then the higher his professional status becomes.

Anonymous review
Approval of a publication in the catalogue of articles takes place after reviewing the papers by the members of the system who have the appropriate competencies.
Reviewing of the materials is done completely anonymously so that social status of a person, or rating, does not influence the opinions of other people.

Joint production of knowledge and information
Any information you submit to the system passes through 3 stages of significance tests:
Check for repetition or plagiarism
The quality of presentation of the material
Anonymous review by a thematic community

Equal access for all participants
Blockchain Zen supports different mechanisms of achieving consensus: Proof-of-Work, Proof of Capacity, Proof-of-Burn, Proof-of-Storage.

Zen restricts the role of the mechanism Proof-of-Work, in order to avoid redistribution of computational powers in favour of farms. The only aim of this restriction is to give equal access to mining of token Zen.
Reputation and ratings
The importance of information, its quality or social weight of a participant is based on the system of ratings and reputations. Ratings as well as reputation are not permanent, they change over time, become higher or lower.
Alternative dispute resolution
As in any society, there may happen a disputable situation between the users of the system. We introduce a system of arbitration when other users with high reputation can form a group of people having the right to discuss the disputable situations and find the solution of it together. Module "Arbitration" is only available to users who have sufficient reputation. The first version of the program involves direct participation of the administration in the settlement of disputes. With the development of the application the role of arbitrators will be transferred to a limited number of users.
Distributed data storage
We implement a distributed data storage to fully implement the idea of decentralization.
Privacy and anonymity
The system of privacy comprises of a few levels. User’s data is not stored on a centralized server. The users dispose of them at their discretion.
Personalized Internet
Zen changes its interface and functionality according to the interests and desires of its users.

What does it mean:
The design of Zen can be changed by its users.
Number of functions have  their priority, those that are used rarely give way to those that are used frequently.

The limitation of a number of parameters for display. For example, if you are not interested in politics then publications on this topic will not be displayed.

Modular interface - you can change or add modules to interface if you think they are convenient.
Blockchain and ZenToken
Blockchain and ZenToken is a connecting link of the entire application. Tokens can be obtained for socially useful activity, through mining or sharing the disc space.
In total
Zen brings together all the necessary things of the Internet into one decentralized distributed network application. Zen is a distributed network with nodes, this ensures confidentiality and privacy of the data. Information is created in this network, updated and distributed between the participants themselves. They are rewarded with ZenToken for that.

What kind of future can we expect with Zen?

You can be connected to Zen without even being connected to the Internet
Improved quality of information
Improved efficiency of human interactions
Increasing trust of people to information and each other
Improved quality of life and productivity
People will have more free time
Constructive development of humans
Reducing online fraud
Equitable distribution of assets

Token Generation and Distribution
The project is being developed by an independent  team of software engineers and IT professionals. And we’ve decided to launch the ICO in order to accelerate the development of the project.

The first stage is Pre ICO in order to prepare for the ICO campaign, to collect feedbacks, comments, opinions of community, to attract consultants, lawyers, economists who share our ideas and support the proposed implementation of the project.
Zen Token
ZenToken is not a currency, not an investment product or other product aiming to bring material benefits to its holder.
ZenToken is a product and element of the work in the system Zen produced by both the system and the users.
ZenToken is a necessary and important part of the Zen system, it is an integral element of it.
ZenToken can be used in the application in order to pay for purchases, content, voting and other social interactions of subjects between each other and with the world.
ZenToken acts as a unit of measure of the economic condition within the Zen system.
ZenTokens are required for Zen system to operate and for access of users to the program.

At the moment we do not have the right to declare of investment attractiveness, we produce not an investment product but a software product. All actions that are carried out with ZenTokens outside Zen are at the discretion of users and under their responsibility.

All the participants of Pre ICO and ICO when buying ZenToken get:
access to the system, starting with the alpha version
the ability to use ZenTokens in the Zen system
perform any other actions with ZenToken one month after the ICO
Crowdsale
Distribution of ZenToken will be held in the format of crowdsales on Pre ICO and ICO.

Maximum number of ZenTokens generated: 270 Million (270,000,000)
Number of ZenTokens for Pre ICO: 20 000 000 ZNT
Number of ZenTokens for ICO: 100 000 000 ZNT
Number of ZenTokens for team: 50 000 000 ZNT
Number of ZenTokens for Zen Fund: 100 000 000 ZNT

Date of ICO: 30.09.2017 - 30.10.2017

Pre ICO information

Soft cap: 1500 ETH.
Hard cap: 5500 ETH.

First 1,500,000 ZenToken will be distributed at a value 1000 ZenTokens per 1 ETH
The remaining ZenTokens  will be distributed at a value 750 ZenTokens per 1 ETH

Date of Pre ICO: 31/07/2017 - 31/08/2017

Everyone who is interested in this project and agree to the terms of this campaign can support the project by taking part in our Pre ICO and get ZenToken.

The project has a status of a semi-closed system until the beta version of it. The access to it is given to the holders of ZenTokens and people with invitations.
Our goals
We open the Pre ICO project in order to collect opinions, comments and critique of the project, to draw attention to the problems that are being solved and gather the minimum required amount for further development and conduction of a large-scale ICO.

Pre ICO also includes collection of funds for the preparation of marketing campaigns, advertising in social networks, registration of all the necessary documents and legalization of the ICO under Swiss jurisdiction.
Details of Pre ICO
Pre ICO will be held on the official website of the project Zen: http://openzen.co using smart contracts of the Ethereum platform.

The creation of new coins is provided by the system through mining and the developing algorithms of reaching consensus PoR (Proof-of-Reputation), which will be available in a full beta version of the project Zen.

After collecting the required minimum Pre ICO campaign will run until the end date available for all participants.
How the money will be used
Research and development, team: 40%
Marketing: 30%
Registration, office: 20%
Technological infrastructure: 10%

All the funds collected above the maximum amount will be transferred to the ICO Fund of the project of Zen and will be used for further development of the project.
How to participate in Pre ICO
Please double check the wallet address to which you send ETH.  Detailed information on participation can be found on the website http://openzen.co
Zen Fund
Zen Fund is a fund aggregating, collecting and distributing Zen Tokens across all the users depending on their social activity and productive activity.

Zen Fund is not established and do not operate in personal interests of its founders. Not more than 20% of all collected assets can go to the needs of the Fund's work and his team.

Details
Adaptable interface
The interface of the Zen application adapts to each user personally, if they want it. Buttons change their location by frequency of use. If you often press the button "Movie", it is moved higher in the list of all menu buttons.
Custom privacy
If users prefer more anonymity then part of their public profile can be hidden from other people. They can also change their online status.
Settings for getting ZenToken
Users may choose what kind of resources they want to share with the network of Zen. Their multipliers of acquiring tokens depend on this.
Restriction of informational noise
Users have the right to limit the content showed to them and the number of messages on a specific topic. Thus they will not obtain information on specific keywords, for example "policy" or any other topic.
Semantic field of a user
A semantic field of frequently used words for each user is created, this affects the content they receive. And also the semantic field forms the field of competence of a person who participates in the reputation system. Users have the right to regulate their semantic fields by adding or removing keywords from there.
User confirmation
Users can verify their identity in various ways. Those who prove their identity with a maximum number of ways can receive additional benefits.
Invitation system
Zen is designed as a semi-closed system. This is done in order to limit the amount of informational garbage and noise. Access to the system is available to the holders of ZenToken and specially invited people. Every active member of Zen has the right to invite 3 of their friends or relatives
Interface
The application is divided into 4 main areas: left sidebar, search block, main application window, the right sidebar.

Zen app has a modular interface. Users have the right to change the location of function blocks as they wish - add and\or remove some.
User roles and access levels
Zen uses a complex system of user roles and access levels, which depend on several parameters such as the level of social activity and constructive activity. This system is closely connected to the system of ratings and reputation. The role is divided into types and levels of access:

Types of roles
Unverified user is the user who failed authentication. This user is given the same benefits as a confirmed user, but he or she is not involved in the ratings and reputation system. This is displayed in their profile.
Verified user is the user who confirmed his identity. This is displayed in their profile. The mechanism of verification is linked to the accounts in the social networks, also we plan to introduce the blockchain projects for confirmation of identity.

Access levels
A regular user. The regular user has access to all system tools apart from the features of the professional rankings/reputation and a number of highly specialized modules.
Specialist. This level can be chosen by a user in order to obtain tools and modules for professional development.
Expert. Transition to this level of is determined by the system when a user has established himself as an expert in a certain area. This type of user is given a number of functions that are not available to others.

Some functions are only accessible to users who are actively involved in the community and life of the application. It's comparable to the situation when newcomers have limitations on a number of forums .
Privacy and security
Security of accounts depends on the user’s preferences for security and privacy. Zen system has an extended set of functions that users use at their own discretion.

Security
Binding to the phone number
Two-step authorization - password, SMS, email
Multisign for community pages, groups, DAO - managing a collective account and changing it only through a mutual solution
Secret phrase that can fully restore user’s access to his or her account.
Transfer of funds made by SMS (if the user has set it), and paid password

Privacy
The users themselves define which elements of their public profile can be seen by other users. Up to complete anonymity, but the ranking and reputation will be visible to all users.
Project Zen uses a p2p model of interaction among its members. All the user’s data is stored on the user's computer, apart from the public data which is stored on the nodes of the network and access to which is given to other members of the network.
Publication
Any user can add content (text, audio, video), set a price in terms of ZenToken for a number of publications if required or implement a mechanism of donation to the author. All publications have their time of life - which is based on the value of information.

Types of publications:
text publications
video and audio publications
voting poll
questions

Text publishing
Types of publications
A short message of 200 characters. Located on the page of the author. It can stay there for up to 10 days.
Post - from 200 to 4000 characters. Located on the page of the author.
Article of a general nature - more than 4000 characters. The article is located in the notes of the author and the notes of those users who have added it to their favourites
Scientific, technical article - more than 4000 characters indicating the primary sources of information. The article is located in the notes of the author, notes of those users who have added it to their favourites and in the "Encyclopedia" section.

Video and audio publications
Every user can publish video and audio files if it does not violate copyrights of other people and organizations.

Questions
Answers to questions add points of competence. The person asking a question can determine the value for the answer from his or her account balance if it is important. The question is relevant for 3 days, during this time it is possible to give an answer to it.

Communities
Community is a functional module of Zen, which consists of separate sections. The creation of communities is possible after the collective voting. If the necessary minimum of people votes in favour of the establishment of a community then it will be created. Initially, all the communities are created by administration.

Types of communities:
Territorial
Professional
Interest-based
Fanclubs
Communities of educational systems (school, University)

Role of participants: novices, specialists, experts
The degree of openness: open, closed
Ratings and reputation
Rating
Rating is based on a qualitative assessment by external sources - users of the system Zen and machine algorithms. It is not the classical 5-and 10-star system. We are building the graph ranking, which is formed by a different set of parameters.

Reputation
Reputation in the app has got a philosophical meaning. All the ideas of the system of reputation are used and implemented by the rating system. With only one difference: reputation applies to all users of the system or organizations; ratings relate to the work of commercial and non-profit organizations.

Reputation is based on socially active and useful activities of users. Publication of information affects the calculation of competences and rating.

In detail
A person has about 3-5 core competencies.
Each competence has a certain number of points.
All competencies are displayed in the user profile depending on the % distribution of points between them.
Analysis of competences of the user happens through the analysis of his or her posts.
Multilinguality
The system Zen is multilingual. A user sets the language himself. If the user has chosen a 2-lingual system, then the information will be given to him in two languages. In this case, in order not to duplicate the functionality of various modules (e.g. professional communities), the system Zen combines these streams into one.
Personalization of the platform
The project Zen is being created with an emphasis on the personalization of each person who uses the system so that everyone could realise their individuality, set design, modules and widgets for themselves.
Additional functionality and modules
Zen app allows you to extend its functionality through modules. Each module represents a specific functional unit. Two identical modules can not exist in the application.

Example: Games, Events, Crowdfunding, Calendar, Exchange, Market, etc

Each module includes a unique set of features that are required for a specific module.

* if a module has the function of making payments, it is always done using ZenToken as a payment unit.
Decentralized autonomous organization
In the system of Zen it is possible to create a Decentralized autonomous organization, establish the necessary rules and start the working. Work of DAO is based on smart contracts.

Architecture and Application
Brief description of architecture

Zen is basically an innovative approach to design and user scenarios. We aim to create the most convenient interface for working with the Internet and to optimize the user scenarios. Adaptive and highly adjustable interface where a user can choose what he wants to see and what he does not. Unlike other projects that are developing technologies, we first develop a unified interface that will allow the users to find and create information easier, to communicate better and to spend fun time online.

The basic functions of the Zen system will be implemented through the combination of several technologies, including Ethereum, IPFS, etc. We assume that the platform Zen will have a distributed decentralized architecture with the content in IPFS and a blockchain Ethereum as a computational mechanism.

IPFS
IPFS - is an interplanetary file system (IPFS). Most of the content, including documents, articles, photos, videos, and various updates to the platform will be stored there. Zen users get another chance to earn income from their own content or storage space if part of the information will be stored on their computers.

Distributed social network
The platform Zen is a distributed social network. Distributed Social Network (DSN) is a network established to protect the privacy of user’s information. User’s personal data is stored exclusively on the client machine of the user. Fully decentralized DSN differ in a complete absence of server. The client of such a network is installed on a user’s computer and acts as a client and a server simultaneously. Zen is a software that implements a distributed social network. Emphasis is put on extensive privacy settings.

Sending information
Each message sent must contain 2 parameters: a) type, b) a list of recipients. The lack of a recipient list would indicate that the message is either unencrypted (open), or is a message of level of node. The list of recipients will contain a line with a private decryption key and a corresponding initialization vector. The decryption key is encoded using a public key of the recipient. The initialization vector will be encrypted using the private key of the sender. All messages will be signed with a digital signature of the sender.

Zen architecture is based on a p2p and f2f model. The information generated by the users is spread between them, i.e. a distributed data storage is implemented. All the data is accumulated in special network nodes. These are common users who act as the nodes.

Public content is stored in IPFS, nodes. Personal data is distributed according to the model of p2p.
Application
Major operating systems that support Zen app are Windows and MacOS.

The visual interface of Zen application is a program that interacts with a local database network, with nodes and other peers.

Any client of Zen app expands on the user's computer network node, lite or full. It depends on the user's settings and his reputation.

A user can change the settings of the client. Such as:
the disk space used more or less.
decentralization: the focus of work may change from p2p to a nodes and back.
storing files locally or in a cloud: the cloud of a nodes or a cloud of the p2p network
Nodes
There do not exist elements of a classical Client-Server in the system of Zen.

The nodes of Zen platform act as hubs that search for sources of information - peers, based on the data entered by a user in the client. Also nodes act as trusted peers, that is, they can store encrypted by users information for further distribution in the network. A user of the network can also become a trusted peer, if he or she has enough reputation and a required disk space - this activity is encouraged by the multiplier of ZenToken.

Company and the Team
About company
Zen Technologies is a non - profit company the main purpose of which is the development of a platform Zen. Zen Technologies does not aim to maximize profits.

We, the team of Zen Technologies, act for the benefit and in the interests of people. Any meaningful decision for the platform Zen and for the company Zen Technolgies is made collectively and on the basis of discussions with all the users of the platform Zen.

ZenToken does not give an exclusive right to vote, as it is not a share. All users of the platform Zen have the right to participate in voting about the development of the platform.

Zen Team
Ilya Druzhinin. Founder & Software Engineer.
John Backer. Software Engineer.
Alexandr Vinarskiy. Software Engineer
Ilya Bogdanov. Software Engineer. Intern.
Dmitriy Himi. UX\UI expert
Bogdan Popov. Community manager.
Irina Druzhinina. Financial analyst.

Road Map
The project has a status of a semi-closed system until the beta version of it. Access to it is given to the holders of ZenToken and the people with invitations.

The road map of the project consists of 8 main points:

Pre ICO: from 1st August to 30th August 2017
Goals: accelerate the development of the alpha version, collect feedbacks, opinions, to refine the concept and attract new people to our team.

ICO: from 15th October 2017 to 15th November 2017
Goals: attract people for testing the alpha version

v.0.1 - december 2017
Goals: Windows app, integration with Ethereum.
Modules: Communities, profile, email, search, news of communities and friends

v.0.2 - Q1 2018
Goals: MacOS app, launch of TestNet
Features:
Modules: messenger, calls, games, lotteria, articles
Ratings
Advanced profile: photo, video, notes

v.0.3 - Q2 2018
Goals: development and testing of the blockchain Zen and the instruments of collective intelligence
Features:
Modules: startups, cinema, radio, music, calendar, events
ZenToken wallet

v.0.4 - Q3 2018
Goals: the version for unix systems, commissioning of the own blockchain for Zen
Features:
Implementing the function of mining
Modules: educational
Kids (the version of Zen for kids)

v.0.5 - Q4 2018
Goals: integration with the business community, mobile app
Modules: stock exchange, conduction of private business in Zen, store

v.1.0 - Q3 2019
Goals: semi-closed public version, public testing


Contacts
Official site: http://openzen.co
Email: mail@openzen.co
Blog: https://medium.com/@openzen
Facebook: http://facebook.com/openzen
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JustOpenZen
Telegram channel: http://t.me/openZen
Telegram group: http://t.me/openZen_eng

Bitcointalk profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1100333