This post summarises my contributions to and offers a few reflections on the @steem-times project: one of six projects numerous people have been working on as part of sndbox’s 2018 summer camp programme.
The aim of the @steem-times is to be ‘steemit’s newspaper’ - providing a first port of call for information about significant developments across the steem ecoystem, ‘quick links’ to some of the best posts across a number of substantive topic areas (such as world politics, sport etc.) and to provide two commentary/ editorial pieces per edition.
Rather than summarise the end result of the project, you can check out the white paper/ initial template on the following links
- Template for posting
- My Google Doc (copy)
- Github doc (put up by @superoo7)
I’ve been working on the @Steem-times whitepaper for the last 10 days with five other, most excellent steemians:
These were a great bunch of people to work with: and despite a few minor initial differences of opinion about the direction of paper, everyone was very flexible and we all manage to work together effectively to produce a ‘white paper’ outlining the rational, aims and objectives,scope and rewards distribution mechanism of the @Steem-times.
The point of this post, as outlined in the summer camp instructions is to outline my part in the project, as outlined in the sndbox summer camp part 2 instructions.
The @steem-times project: contribution summary
It took us a few days to get started TBH, and we spent most of the first week in ongoing conversations on discord, broken by time zone differences, and, despite agreeing on a name relatively early on (the @steem-times) we didn’t really ‘get going’ as a group until our first ‘formal’ collective meeting on Sunday 3rd June.
Probably the first useful contribution I on 30th May made was to create a shared google doc to act as a general template for the areas the ‘white paper’ should cover:
Also on 30th May, I produced this post:Sndbox summer camp: first thoughts on project development in order to try and elicit some feedback about what steemians wanted out of a blockchain based newspaper. In this post I also outlined what I felt would be the most useful ‘use’ for a blockchain based newspaper:
- Links to an summaries of news from @steemitblog (Steem Inc)
- Summaries of Witness discussions (which take place in discord)
- Summaries of data posts from @arcange and @penguinpablo and others with commentary
- Links to informed commentary on steem issues, with analysis, e.g. to the kind of posts @kevinwong puts out - occasionally, more frequently recently.
- Whale movements.
- SMT developments
- dApps developments
- there's probably lots of other stuff I've missed
I had three comments (equivalent to 50% of the future active user base on steemit by the end of 2018 at current attrition rates), and it was confirmed through these comments that having regular updates on the steem ecosystem would be useful.
I spent most of Friday 1st and Saturday 2nd of June writing this post: 61 accounts to follow if you want to keep up with developments in the steem ecosystem - basically these are the accounts I’d draw on to write the ‘steem news’ sections in each edition of the @steem-news. In retrospect I should have posted this under the #sndboxsummercamp tag, but I didn’t for some reason. I do feel a blockchain based newspaper should mainly focus on ‘steem ecosystem’ news, and it has ended up being the single biggest section of the paper, which I feel is the right direction.
By 3rd June @warpedpoetic had done a useful first draft of a white paper which I looked through and did some minor mods on (grammar being a native English speaker) and I also sliced it up into slightly different sections.
I also developed this ‘mock up’ (which was eerily similar to @warpedpoetic’s paper version) of how I’d like the paper to look, in Padlet. It didn’t quite end up this way, but something to work towards:
Also on 3rd June, I wrote the ‘frequency of posting and categories to be covered by the @Steem-times, consolidating previous suggestions on this matter already made by other members of the team. This reflects the fact that most team members wanted the paper to be about more than just ‘steem ecoystem’ developments, which is fair enough.
Following June 3rd, I had a manic few days at work (exam season), but managed to get back to it by Friday 8th, by which point the white paper had been moved forwards by other team members…so it was just a matter of doing a quick ‘summary reminder’ of outstanding tasks….
My final contribution was to do a quick run through of the white paper to check for grammar on Friday 8th June, and putting in some initial mark up to make @gabriellcd’s job of publishing it on steemit a little easier. I also cut out any sections we hadn’t had time to write: it is a project in development after all!
Conclusions/ final thoughts
Overall I’m very pleased with the development of the project so far, but probably the key phrase there is ‘so far’. I feel we’ve got a nice starting point, and laid the foundations, but there’s quite a lot more work to do moving forwards: namely: developing some standards by which to judge contributions, developing an appropriate ‘editorial process’, onboarding new people.
The biggest barrier to getting more done was simply everyone being so busy with their offline worlds: one original candidate even had to drop out entirely because of personal issues: and this serves as an important reminder that steemt’s not the entire world. It’s also comforting to know that this is something we have in common with at least half of the top 20 witnesses: with, for many of them, steem being only a minor part of their crypto portfolios and making up an even tinier proportion of the their wealth more generally.
I was suitably impressed by everyone’s language skills, given that English was the second language for half the team. Personally, even with my over-education, I’m not a language purist and I thought that leaving some of the contributions in near enough their original state, rather than ‘Englishifying’ them worked quite nicely to give the white paper more linguistic character.
I’ve long thought that precise grammar and ‘super correct’ English is something those who lack imagination use to oppress others, so I wasn’t about to go down this route. 99/100 meaning is not lost if grammar is a left a little loose. (And besides, correcting grammar and ‘language-ing up’ are two of the most utterly tedious intellectual tasks out there!)
Final, final thoughts
This has been great for me personally as thinking through how the the first section of the newspaper (updates on the steem ecosystem might) ‘work’ ties in nicely with my mission to conduct a sociological investigation of steemit, as one has to know ‘what’s occurring’ within the ecosystem to be able to do this effectively.
Finally, thanks to @anomadsoul, @guyfawkes4-20 and @voronoi for their contributions in organizing the whole project over these last several months!
And very final thoughts
I'm going to end on an 'objective note' - being forwards thinking, I have taken to monitoring @penguinpablo's daily steem stats, and I am sorry to report that based on these stats ATW there is no evidence for being positive about steem's future - blockchain activity is currently in steady decline folks.
Hopefully some of these projects will help reverse this situation.