SteemSTEM Summer 2018 Project Update

in #steemstem6 years ago (edited)

Today, we are pleased to release the summer update of the @steemstem project, an initiative aiming to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics on Steem.

Lots of positive changes have occurred in the last few months, and many more good things are to come, as is written below. However, before digging into all the glorious details, let’s start with a brief summary:


[Credits: @elvisxx71]

  • Fresh news on the accomplished steemSTEM community.

  • Our updated philosophy, and how we curate STEM content (in 5 different languages). We of course illustrate our statements by statistics and numbers, as we are scientifically-minded people, after all. Very importantly, changes have been implemented within our curation rules!

  • Future projects: a steemSTEM user interface, a steemSTEM merchandise shop and a new meetup for the most immediate future, although the big idea is to upgrade steemSTEM to a concrete platform for science communication.

  • Of course, we cannot omit from this project update a mention to all our supporters (specific delegators and trailers, @curie, @utopian-io and @steempress-io).


SteemSTEM in a nutshell and today

The steemSTEM project was initiated almost two years ago with the aim of building a community of people interested in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) on Steem.

We believe that making Steem a better place for STEM is crucial for the long-term development of the platform as a whole, so that it could not only be friendly to quality, interesting and cutting-edge STEM content but also become a real platform for science communication while invigorating and inspiring the minds of the community and beyond.

In order to accomplish this goal, we are of course showing support to STEM authors. But this support does not only consist in upvotes from the @steemstem account and its trailers.

We additionally foster our members to act as a real community, which one can be a part of through our burgeoning discord server. This means we go beyond the ‘I estimate that I write a good post and I thus deserve a good pay-check’ paradigm. We actually encourage steemSTEM members to actually have fun reading each others' posts, commenting on them and asking questions. In short, we develop interactions between the steemSTEM members.

We are glad to see that our community is today stronger than ever, and this outcome has been in particular possible thanks to a great crew of steemSTEM honor members.

SteemSTEM honor members are members of steemSTEM who voluntarily proposed themselves to improve the community. Their role consists in mentoring newcomers, helping them to write quality posts and engage the community. Together with the management and curators, the honor members also track fraud (plagiarism), help in detecting those who do not care about the community (and are only interested in a pay-check) and in handling complaints of those feeling unfairly treated by steemSTEM (from the complaints room of our discord server).


Curation (June 2018 update)

Our curation team scours the Steem blockchain for original and quality content related to the STEM fields in five different languages (English, German, French, Spanish and Italian). Using the #steemstem tag is recommended to facilitate our work, but not mandatory. After having found a post, a curator decides on the voting strength it should be voted (small, medium, standard or high).

Anything larger than small requires a second opinion, and getting higher rewards means bringing something one cannot find anywhere else. This could for instance be an article about cutting-edge science not discussed anywhere else, or a novel and/or non-standard way of presenting a topic. In other words, science communication will be pushed forward from now on!

On the other hand, we will try to be as generous as possible with the small and medium votes. Even if this consists of a small amount of SBD, this is easily 50 times more than what many users get. We will use this as a mean to promote informative content and make it more visible.

Furthermore, a single person (manager, curator, author) cannot get more than a 2.75% share of all steemSTEM votes cast during the previous 14 days. Nobody from our team is also eligible for curie support.

Since the beginning of our partnership with @curie on September 13th, 2017, we have upvoted 8937 posts from more than 1354 unique authors, sharing a pie of about 370,000 SBD. The detailed statistics about how many posts we vote on, how many unique authors we vote on week after week and how our weekly voting power is used can be seen here:



As can be seen, there is a strong correlation between the Steem price and the general authoring behavior on the platform.


A better window on steemSTEM: Our future UI and merchandise shop

In order to increase the visibility of our initiative, we are currently designing our own user interface. It will allow users to filter the content of the blockchain and display, by default, all posts upvoted by steemSTEM together with all posts written by authors added to a steemSTEM white-list.

In this way, we will be able to show a cleaner version, according to our standards, of the STEM content on the blockchain. With this on the hand, we hope to be able to convince external contributors, like renowned science bloggers and scientists in general, to join Steem as a perfect place for the diffusion of the scientific culture.

Moreover, we are in parallel developing an online merchandise shop where steemSTEM goodies, books and many other STEM-related items will be offered.

As for any other user interface, the steemSTEM UI will also allow users to directly post, do transactions, etc. More information will be made available in a couple of weeks. In terms of timeline, we hope to deploy our UI within the summer period. As usual with development projects, delays could however be expected.

This UI sub-project has been funded by the team, i.e. managers and curators, who are getting reduced shares of the curation rewards for the last 2 (and next 5) months.


The second steemSTEM meetup


[image credits: LIGO]

As you probably all know, the last Nobel prize in physics was rewarding the discovery of gravitational waves (see here for some physics).

For this reason, it is natural to move from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where our first meetup was organized, to VIRGO, one of the three detectors currently probing spacetime for gravitational waves.

As can be seen on the official VIRGO agenda, our visit is planned for September 21.

For this reason, we are happy to pre-announce the second steemSTEM meetup. We will meet in Rome, on September 20-22. Please save the dates!

More information will be provided soon.


Special thanks and closing remarks

Before closing this post, we want to thank all our supporters.

This includes our long-standing partnership with @curie who trusted us as representative of the science community on Steem as well as our recent partnership with @utopian-io who decided to use a very generous fraction of its voting power to trail valuable and interesting content related to science, technology and open source development. Moreover, we are grateful to @steempress-io who trusts our curation of any science-related content posted on steempress as a validation of its quality.

SteemSTEM would not be what it is without those delegating some of their Steem Power to us. We have been delegated today 61 kSP from both the management and @reggaemuffin, @minnowbooster, @xeldal, @tobixen, @lukestokes.mhth, @dber, @zest, @gra, @flyyingkiwi, @greece-lover, @mcfarhat, @katerinaramm, @alexdory, @anevolvedmonkey , @dexterdev, @singhtheripper, @physics.benjamin, @yann85, @lianaakobian, @robotics101 and @christinaa.

Serendipitously, the @steemstem account is, will be, in few minutes or hours, 10 kSP large ;)

We also thank all those trailing us, either through our homemade voting-bot (more information on our discord server) or via steemauto. The list is amazingly too long to be shown. And as well those who do not trail us automatically, but achieve instead an amazing job in manual curation!

Finally, thanks to all of you (delegators, trailers and steemSTEM community members) for your trust and enthusiasm in our project! We believe we can make Steem a positive place for STEM aficionados. We hope it will become one of the big STEM communication platforms in the future, where scientific culture will be shared and enjoyed, and where relationships can be built.

Thank you all for bringing your contributions in building this community.

The steemSTEM team:

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Looks like the well-oiled machine that should be!
I want to congratulate the people who work non stop, despite probably having their own deadlines and lives and those that do this out of their beliefs. I have met you all, talked to you all and appreciate the work you do!

This is what keeps me here! The power to enlighten or educate people while also enlightening and educating myself. And with the rewards, I am growing the STEM community and my personal projects.

To celebrate this, I have bought 500 STEEM which will be delivered to my account today, to compensate for the moments when I can't give you guys my mental attention (aka when I work) by being in the trail.

The UI is a wonderful addition, I will work on a plan to bring more highly specialized people here.

Again congrats!

Thanks for this very nice message. It is really appreciated! And we are of course looking forward to your future contributions (could be post, participation, mentoring, supporting others, bringing new science lovers on board,... everything)!

And everything will be done, with fun and pleasure!

Out with a bang. This is the kind of update I always look forward to. 1,354 unique author is a big achievement and I am sure more and more authors are still trooping in. The mentoring initiative has really improved things generally. Kudos to everyone!

On the meet-up, it would really be nice if some of us from Nigeria can make it this time, unlike the last time. Let's just keep our fingers crossed.

As I said to @sco, since we leaked the dates a lot in advance, maybe will this allow people coming from far away to organize themselves more efficiently :)

Exactly. Let's hope things pick up for steem before then, it will realy ease logistics. You know what I mean :)

Of course! ^^

Thanks to everyone involved with @steemstem! I'm really excited for the future of SteemSTEM, and I'm definitely going to be buying some merchandise once that is ready. I can totally see myself drinking coffee from a SteemSTEM mug while writing my posts!

The SteemSTEM UI is also really interesting, and I hope it will turn out to be good. Right now it can be pretty difficult to find good STEM content by browsing the science tags, so hopefully this new interface will make it easy for all of us to discover the best posts.

Keep up the great work!

Thanks for your nice words and your continuous contributions to steemSTEM too. We are all very excited by the future :)

Do you guys plan on making the merchandise for sale with Steem by the way? Because I would really love to buy some SteemSTEM stuff with my Steem or SBD.

Of course :)

That's reassuring to hear :)

We also thank all those trailing us, either through our homemade voting-bot (more information on our discord server) or via steemauto.

Right so, and I hope it is still allowed to upvote manually (after reading an article) on Steemit as well? :-)

If yes, I will continue granting you my manual 100 % upvotes from time to time. :)

Apart from that remark let me encourage you to keep doing your great work here!

Argghhh I am feeling very ashamed, and I can only apology.

I edited the post, and I take the opportunity to use this reply to thank you, together with all other manual curators (I see a least 4-5 names) for the non-stopping support to STEM on Steem.

In your case, the support is even there from the very early days! (Thanks)1000

Argghhh I am feeling very ashamed ...

You shouldn't: I guess I should have written my frustration about the automated nature of Steemit not under your article ... because I see it more as a general Steemit problem than a special SteemStem issue ... So maybe it was not fair to write it here (it was just that I noticed it here again while reading your article).

Thanks nevertheless for mentioning manual curation as well in your post now - in my eyes it is important that some people continue doing that. :)

Note that even if we automated many things, every single voted post has to be singly (small 5% votes) or doubly (anything larger) manually curated. Only the trail fires automatically. We have not replaced all our curators by AI :D

Nice update. The VIRGO meetup sounds awesome! Looking forward to checking out the new shop and UI.

Will you manage to pass by? :)

I wish, but with a relatively new job I don't think I can take the time off to go to Rome :(

I still enjoy reading everyone's posts about it though.

Maybe the 3rd meetup, if in the US :)

Soooo many exciting things to come, it's pretty unreal in my head =D

Meeeh.... change the head :)

Maybe mine would suffice :)

Do you mean a @mobbs with a @samminator head? Is that a piece of new technology? :D

Exactly. Mobbs-Samminator Transcranial technology :)

Do you know what "MST" (the abbreviation of your stuff) stands for in French? Sexually Transmissible Disease :D

Omg!! Je suis mort 😰

by default, all posts upvoted by steemSTEM together with all posts written by authors added to a steemSTEM white-list.

Neat! With whom do I need to sleep to get approval?

For this reason, we are happy to pre-announce the second steemSTEM meetup. We will meet in Rome, on September 20-22. Please save the dates!

So another meeting with a lot of socially awkward people? Sounds like the ideal place for me to be.

I think the answer to that is rather obvious

:*

You really don't give up, do you?

I almost feel bad, because I'm probably going to break your heart at some point.

My heart is truly unbreakable, just as my will

Oh, so young, so naive.

I don't want to know/read ... ;)

Neat! With whom do I need to sleep to get approval?

Anyone but me... :D

So another meeting with a lot of socially awkward people? Sounds like the ideal place for me to be.

It depends if you bring your German humour with you ;)

Anyone but me... :D

You don't know what you're going miss.

It depends if you bring your German humour with you ;)

You should be well aware by now, we Germans have everything but humor :)

This is what I meant :D

For this reason, we are happy to pre-announce the second steemSTEM meetup. We will meet in Rome, on September 20-22. Please save the dates!

I really want to attend this :(

I am applying for an ICTP (Italy) workshop which will be held in November. Maybe I can meet Italian steemSTEM-ers!

Also non Italian... Europe is small ;)

I hope you will be able to make the meetup!

I hope you will be able to make the meetup!

You mean in November?

September. You could come twice :)

:) Is there some funding programme available for students from @steemstem?

Not yet... We need a higher Steem price for that :D

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@steemstem!

Words cannot adequately capture how I feel about this initiative. From the ingenuity of the management, the cooperation atmosphere, the ever dynamic rule change to address the prevailing realities, to even treatment of members without recourse to whatever you are! Everything about @steemstem is simply 👌👌!

Furthermore, a single person (manager, curator, author) cannot get more than a 2.75% share of all steemSTEM votes cast during the previous 14 days. Nobody from our team is also eligible for curie support.

Very well thought out policy inclusion! Kudos to all members who are working day and night to ensure @steemstem becomes a suitable destination for Erudite scientists and science enthusiasts alike.

Regards

@eurogee of @euronation and @steemstem communities

Thanks @eurogee. We are now following your nice encouraging words day after day, week after week and so on. This is really appreciated!