Introducing SteemMakers - The first community for makers and DIYers on steem

Mission

At SteemMakers we believe every individual has been gifted with unique talents. Talents come in many forms and one of them is the talent 'to make'. SteemMakers wants to support every maker with their efforts in a meritocratic way, unbiased by wealth or status.

With 30 000 active users and 100 000 daily posts on the Steem Blockchain, it is difficult to find good maker content and hard for makers to give their content visibility. We aim to be a guiding and helping community, supporting makers where we can. SteemMakers can provide support to makers posting on the Steem Blockchain by giving their work an audience, and providing a place to look for inspiration and information. The SteemMakers team will curate and support outstanding makers’ content, hoping to empower and grow the maker community, which in turn will benefit all.

Audience

Since SteemMakers focusses on ‘makers’, we have to define our target audience. There is no single definition of the word ‘maker’ and the meaning of it differs quite a bit within the context. Because of this we try to make our own definition to define our content. We do not intend to narrow the term too much on SteemMakers.

We think that anyone who creates should be considered a maker and deserves our respect. However, we have to create some boundaries so the project doesn’t become too difficult for us to manage. We want to focus on both the maker and do-it-yourself (DIY) movement. With DIY we mean all activity to create or modify anything when it is accomplished by an individual rather than that of a paid professional. The makers movement is a technology driven subgroup of the DIY movement. It focusses on the creation of new devices as well as tinkering with existing ones. Open source hardware in its various forms plays an important role in this. Typical subjects are electronics, robotics and 3D printing.

What do we offer?

Readers and curators

We offer one central hub dedicated to quality makers’ content. There will be no need to search high and low for quality content and guess at possible tags of interest. No need to follow accounts that fill your feed with posts that don’t necessarily interest you, just to make sure you don’t miss that one awesome maker post they publish once in a blue moon.

Bloggers and authors

• We support outstanding content by increasing its visibility. SteemMakers will support the content by voting, automatically increasing the visibility on steem front-ends such as steemit.com and busy.org.
• This selected content will also be gathered and shown on the SteemMakers website, where we aim to provide the best makers’ content as discoverable as possible.
• The most outstanding content will also be featured in regular communication for extra promotion.
• Increasing the contents’ visibility will also increase your account visibility and will allow you to grow your network and meet many new interesting people. After all, Steem is a blockchain-based social network.
• Votes made by the SteemMakers community account will generate a modest reward for your making efforts and the documentation to support your work.
• SteemMakers also maintains a discord server. This is an all-in-one voice and text chat which is free, secure, and works in your browser but also has desktop and phone apps. Using this you can interact with us, the SteemMakers team, but also with like-minded people in our community. We aim to help you in whatever way possible and hope to encourage learning and co-operation within the maker community on Steem.

Investors

SteemMakers does not intend to be another short-term money-making machine lacking long term growth. Our project is an investment into the Steem blockchain and its users. We aim not only to have people rewarded, but to become engaged and collaborative thus promoting original content and growth of the blockchain itself. Our engaged users will then feel more encouraged to invest their time and energy, which in time will be of benefit to us all.

Without Steem power for the community account we can’t make this project a success. Delegation is a concept on the Steem blockchain, following Hard Fork 19, that allows you to support our community growth by delegating your Steem power to us without taking any risk. You retain full ownership of your hard-earned SP and can claim it back at any time, you keep full control.

We don’t ask you to do this for free and out of idealism. Therefore, we propose to pay you frequently pro rata your investment. We will use the curation rewards to grow our community, to pay for our facilitation and to reward you for investing in us. We are open to any discussion about this because after all, investors are important to any new project.

Roadmap

This is a brand-new project that will evolve frequently, particularly in the early stages of its life. We are a small team and our time is limited – even with all the hard work we have planned ahead, miracles are unlikely to happen overnight.

Phase 1: Get things up and running

In our first phase, we will manually select content and promote it by voting and referring to it on our website. We will work on our own visibility, try to get as much feedback as possible from the community and try to find the necessary investors. This initial phase will impact what we plan in the future as it will provide us with a better understanding of the needs and requirements of the audience, as well as our investors. We will work on our methodology and tools and evolve as the project grows.

Phase 2: Improve the user experience

Once we are up and running and the project finds traction both with the community and investors, we will scale the project up to provide continuous improvement where we see most important. For example, improved categorization and navigation will be needed to allow the users to easily navigate and search for content, and we see this aspect ever-changing in order to remain of the best quality and most useable.

Phase 3: Make the website the central point

The last step is to develop the website in such a way that the user does not need to leave to create a new blog entry. We aim to make SteemMakers.com a one-stop shop in which all options are available from a single website.

A big thanks to @techslut, @suesa and one ‘anonymous steemian’ for editing my original writings.

Let us know what you think. We're very much interested in your feedback. Please comment below or join us on Discord.

The SteemMakers team.

www.steemmakers.com

---

Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

---