Idea behind MapalaNet Travel Community and its short story

MapalaNet project was born in May 2015 in Indonesia, as a common commercial project and during 2 years of its existence transformed into the idea of a Global Travellers Community as well as a “People’s Corporation”, that would be able to bring the advantages of decentralization and blockchain technologies into the real world. We aim to create a number 1 tourist company and sideline such industry giants as Tripadvisor. We will tell about what we went through as well as about the current events in our blog, but for now here is a short story of our journey.

The idea was born when @dark.sun was traveling in Indonesia and got acquainted with members of Mapala — the biggest community in Indonesia. They are based out of universities and are an unofficial rescue service, also Mapala alumni are responsible for 80% of all the tourism in the country. Since 1964 millions were part of this organization, including Indonesia’s current president — Joko Widodo.

@dark.sun was surprised by the scale of the movement, their orderliness and a complete lack of internet presence. The last thing isn’t surprising, considering that the online penetration in Indonesia is on the level of early 2000ies. He then decided to create a commercial project, that would be a database of all the events, that Mapala is offering in Indonesia (p2p tourism).

Work on an alpha version was started, still just a common business project, but over time the idea transformed into something greater: a global community of DIY travellers and a new type of corporation, that belongs and is governed by all the participants. When the project was ready in early 2016 it offered a service to bring up organizers and travellers, as well as journey constructor for interactive route planning.

Archive version of the site is available here.

Our movement was very active in Russia, when at the peak we were able to gather more than a hundred representatives all over the country. In most active places we had groups of activists that were growing the project locally, but unfortunately we weren’t able to find a way to monetize their efforts, so we had to stop to reconsider our future strategy.

In search for the solution we turned to the world of cryptocurrencies, and particularly Steem, which launched just recently at that point. We’ve studied its capabilities and in autumn decided to transfer all of our development to Steem platform. In the next post we will tell you about the early days and what is the original Mapala community Indonesia is. Follow us, we’re going for an interesting ride! ;)

Translated by @xanoxt for MapalaNet project