Minnow Support Project- Announcements, Governance, Policies

Annoucements
So happy to add @someguy123, @thecryptodrive to witnesses already running the Minnow Support Project: @aggroed, @ausbitbank, @teamsteam, and a key supporter @canadian-coconut.

Also, have added @theprophet0 as a Witness, Jr. as he's still a legal minor.

Also, lurking in that you can find two other witnesses @acidyo and major delegator @neoxian.

In total we have 8 witnesses in the channel helping to manage a completely public and free Discord channel- https://discord.gg/HYj4yvw

Announcement
The STEEMFEST MINNOW promotion is ongoing now. If you have earned less than 5k SP and have fewer than 500 followers you're eligible for an all expense paid trip to Steemfest brought to you by @aggroed and the Minnow Support Project @minnowsupport.

https://steemit.com/steemfest/@aggroed/steemfest-minnow-all-expense-paid-trip-to-steemfest

You can still apply through this Sunday. Make a steemit post, and place that link in the comment section.

MSP and PALnet welcome Venezuala, Italy, India, Australia, and Africa channels
This is an open and pubilc service that's completely voluntary to use. As we grow we'll continue to add specific channels to help local communities, language based communities, and economically distressed communities. If you have a small community already you're interested in porting over to the larger community please contact @aggroed.

Venezuala is managed by @efrageek. He's doing his best to bring Steem to economically ravaged Venezuala. Please stop by and show him your support. A white paper about their project and their community can be found on the @provenezuela page- https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@provenezuela/project-venezuela-official-launch-white-paper-english-version-1497914210-8695834

the Africa-Zimbabwe channel is managed by @tinashe. He's working to bring Steemit to economically hard hit Zimbabwe, and show the power of a deflationary currency in his country.

The Italy channel is managed by @lino creating an Italian community.

The teamaustralia group is managed by @ausbitbank and is a lively group nearly immediately.

The India Channel is run by @varunsangwan (Mr. Dark) and will bring his small community from another Discord channel over to the larger public community.

General Update
The PALnet Discord channel has merged with the MSP. Collectively after 7 days there are 740 unique people that have come. There can be as many as 200 sitting in the chat.

The community account @minnowsupport has 110,000 SP. 90k SP from the very generous donation of @benjojo. 20k have come from a delegation deal with @neoxian.

The Minnow Support Project would love to partner with additional whales interested in delegating Steem Power to this project!

There are 4 bots running in the chat room.

Typical bot
Tatsumaki
Banjo
Minnowsupport

You are welcome to run the $help command in the playingwithbots channel to see what they can do.

Minnowsupport in particular is voting quite a bit.
There were a total of 1440 votes today. Voting power is down to 16.81%. There were 930 votes yesterday. Voting power on the bot has been decreased and a timer has been introduced to only allow 2 votes in a 24 hour period. (please wait at least 20 minutes before using the $upvote URL command to ensure the vote will go through).

Streemian- We're now the number 4 trail on streemian. If you're not using your Voting Power. We can help while you get ot know that your SP is helping a small army of Minnows grow.

Problem Statement
The learning curve on Steemit is remarkably difficult. Many people (especially minnows) will spend hours crafting very thoughtful content and find it receives very few views, very few upvotes, and very little reward. This heartbreaking experience can last for months where the user feels powerless, frustrated, envious, and confused. It appears that Steemit only favors wealth creation for a handful of people and not for the everyone that steps foot on the platform.

Vision Statement
The challenges on Steemit are best met through a community who seeks to help one another succeed on the platform through education, personal connection, leadership, and community curation. By carefully structuring a community people can find the help they need to write better articles, to reach a wider audience, connect with others, and grow their wealth and influence on Steemit.

Mission Statement
The Minnow Support Project is the number one community on Steemit to incorporate training, support, and curation in order to facilitate life cycle growth on the platform from Minnowhood to Whalehood and to continue paying it forward as new members join. The Discord channel is not a business, but instead a completely voluntary public service brought to you by elected Witnesses.

Plan
The Minnow Support Project is part education, community, and curation:

Education: Through a series of educational seminars, content review, training, and individual consultation the Minnow Support Project will support a highly structured curriculum to transition new passionate authors into successful bloggers capable of writing content that catches views, upvotes, resteems, and followers.

Community: It's essential for success that people develop a supporting community. The first goal is friendship and connection with other humans. As that develops projects, plans, companies, visions, and changes to the world can be enacted. Minnow Support Project will provide a friendly community to embrace new members as they make their way on the platform.

Curation: The Minnow Support Project utilizes tiered cyborg curation to facilitate non-spammy, non-shitpost, high quality, semi-manual, community curation. In effect we utilize a series of community bots to facilitate curation. Members can freely use the lowest tier bot to upvote their content. The bot is upvoted by community members using steemvoter to grow the community bot steempower, and the bot vote is followed by the community using streemian to allow the poster to get support from the community. There are timers on the lowest tier bot that force limited community upvotes from one account in a given period of time so that users aren't incentivized to upvote shit content. Additionally, the votes are made through publicly displaying the upvoted content insuring that people that do upvote their own shitpost will be quickly smacked down by the community.

Bot Registration
The bots are free to use for the whole community. For those interested in upvotes form the community bots please follow these steps.

Join Discord.
Hop in the registration channel on the left side of the screen
Type $register Steemitusername
Send the bots 0.001 steem OR SBD
Type $register steemitusername again
Voting with the bots
Go into the upvote-resteem channel
type $upvote posturl

There is a 12 hour timer on your posts. Please wait at least 20 minutes before using this command on your post or the vote may not go through.

There is now a comment mentioning the Minnow Support Project on all posts that have used the free service.

Membership
Starting membership for Minnows requires the following.

Personality: You have to be a kind and friendly person willing to help and support others. Some crass behavior is expected in a internet community, but be kind or be kicked.

Community: The community gathers at the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty (PALnet) Discord channel: https://discord.gg/HYj4yvw

Membership tiers:

Guest: Anyone is welcome as a guest in the Discord Server. Some crassness is tolerated as it's an internet chat and talk room, but purpuseful rudeness, threats, harrassment, etc will result in fast bans. The Discord channel is completely voluntary and a public space. Literally nothing is required to be in the room. These are additional options.

Registered: Anyone is welcome to register with the bots. As seen above please enter the registration channel and type the commands. If you feel it's important ping aggroed by typing @aggroed in the Discord room and tell me you have registered and I'll promote you to "registered."

Member tier-

Membership requires registering your account with 2 powerful steem curation tools.

Steemvoter.

Streemian.

Follow @minnowsupport

Steemvoter is a program that automatically upvotes authors you support. You must have Steemvoter setup with a rule supporting @minnowsupport. This must be at 100% voting power. If we're all upvoting @minnowsupport it's just a matter of time before it grows.

Streemian is a program that automatically votes on a post after the curator you choose has upvoted a post. In this case we'll all use Streemian to follow @minnowsupport 's curation trail found here: https://streemian.com/profile/curationtrail/trailing/416. There are hundreds of votes being used every day by the bot. If you supply no tags to reduce your voting then you should set the voting power at 15% or less. You can use specific tags like minnowsupportproject or msp if you only want your vote to support MSP related posts.

To get your promotion and the DING you're looking for please send screenshots to @aggroed or available witnesses in the Discord channel.

https://steemit.com/minnowsupport/@rhondak/tutorial-for-palnet-registration

Tagging posts with minnowsupportproject or MSP
Good tagging
Fantastic Use- Making a post about Peace, Abundance, and/or Liberty. Making a post about the Discord channel. Making a post about things happening in the MPS community or account.

Questionable Use- Making a post about alcohol, tossing a note at the end about something PAL or MSP related, but it's basically a one off in your footer.

Abuse- Using those tags when the post doesn't have anything to do with the group. You'll get warnings... then you'll get bans.

Things not to tag or vote on
Flame wars
Posts that mention a million people
Shit talk
Things that are intentionally inflammatory
Porn

Back to membership
Greeters- Everyone is welcome to become a Greeter. Go through the membership requirements. Then write a post about your experience with MSP. Be sure to include some version of a promise to help users that work with the community.

Post this application publicly in the Greeter section.

Greeters also have the ability to post in the Manual Curation channel. Higher SP account periodically review this section to manually upvote the contents. Please only post 1 article a week for review.

Abuse
If you upvote your own shitposts (a post that is poorly written, induces resentment in the community, or has very little content) you're likely to be banned.

Growth within the community
New tiers are coming. Higher level teirs will have access to either high SP votes or a separate community account all together.

Tiers will include Specific channel moderation & general moderation.

Dolphin and Whales
First, Dolphins and Whales are excluded from standard membership requirements.

Dolphins and Whales will have their own Discord Role, but carries no authority in the community.

Dolphins and Whales that want to support the project and be members can do so through Delegation. Delegation will be tiered at 1k, 5k, 10k, 20k, 50k, 100k+and ranks created accordingly.

Witnesses
Publicly elected Witnesses run the show. They have full control in there. You must have a minimum of 100 votes and 10PV to be considered for this spot in the Discord group. You also need to have a 1v1 session with Aggroed to make sure you can answer the million questions you're going to get in there.

There's also a jr Witness section for Prophet0. He's an awesome witness, but still a legal minor. Full control to him, but we keep an eye on him too until he's 18.

Public Donation Requests
1 day a week at random will be picked as donation request day. People will be asked to donate directly to the community bot towards the benefit of everyone. A post will be made announcing the fund drive and who participated. There are zero required fees or donations to be a part of this completely public organization, but you do have to put up with spam once a week.

There is also now a comment placed on every post that utilized the bot. Please upvote the comment to support the project.

chatrooms
General- Talk to folks, put in pictures, put in PAL or MSP related links. Ask questions. Use simple bot commands. Don't do registration. Don't put personal posts. Only posts that are relevant to the entire steemit community or specially the Minnow Support Project should be in general.

bounties: This is new. You're welcome to run a mini contest in the Discord room. Give people a set amount of time to post about a certain topic and give a reward to the best poster. Announce in General, but run it and leave posts in bounties.

MSP-posts-only: If you have a post relevant to the group you want folks to see please place here.

conversation-noposting- Don't link or play with bots. It's just to hang out. No post promotion whatsoever.

greeter application- Place the post you made for greeter here. Ping a witness after you make the post.

Membership application- You're welcome to contact a witness privately for membership. If you'd like you may also post pics of your steemvoter and streemian registration here. Steemvoter at 100% on minnowsupport and 10% or less on the streemian trail.

upvote-resteem- All upvotes should happen here. Please check out other's posts as well as your own for potential resteems and follows.

peer-review- Drop in posts that you are looking for constructive criticism on.

playingwithbots- $help will show you all the bot commands, but please keep this out of general.

BrandNewHere- is a great place to go to find some help, links, and descriptions about the Discord channel. see waht other newbies did.

follow-train: Met a friend or think someone is cool? Find them in the follow train. Don't post anything else in there. Just the URL to your steemit account.

Manual-curation- @aggroed is checking posts manually for community resteems and 100% upvotes. Must have achieved Greet status to be able to post in there.

imagery: Lots of artists. Feel free to share your art.

teamaustralia- Active community of Australians

africa-zim- Growing community of Africans

Italy- Growing community of Italian speakers

India- Growing community from India

Venezuela- Active community from Venezuela and other Spanish speakers

writing advice- several articles about how to grow your account on Steemit.

follow-train: Feel free to post just your steemit url so people can follow you. If your Discord name doesn't match your Steemit handle feel free to elaborate, but keep it breif.

Voice Channel
Don't be an ass. Be good to people. It's not a place to catch a date. Should be fun.

Problems, Questions, Concerns
Ping @aggroed, if it's urgent and I'm not there all Witnesses have full control over Discord.

We reserve the right to update these guidelines as we help make the space. It will stay public and free.

Come for the bots, stay for the community