My application for a vote from @minnowsupport and giving NOTICE I'm changing my witness votes on Saturday to follow @minnowsupport

This coming Saturday I'm going to switch my witness vote from my previous picks and start proxying to @minnowsupport. The witnesses and moderators who operate The Minnow Support Project are going to vote on applications on a monthly basis to figure out who they are going to vote for. So, this post serves both as a second notice of the change and my application to be approved for a witness vote by @minnowsupport.

My History

I've been on this platform for over a year. I spent the first 8 months or so posting somewhat infrequently and not being an altogether helpful Steemian. I didn't really understand the benefits that can come from a platform like this or how it could be transformational. At one point my writing on the block wasn't very good and I admitted that to myself so I went looking for a high quality author to emulate. I picked @kaylinart. I wrote an article about how she formatted her posts and she was kind enough to resteem it. @fyrstikken was also kind enough to resteem it and from just those two resteems I was about to basically double my follower count over night.

It also changed my perspective of this place. They were able to help me greatly. They of course have put in considerable time and effort to grow their accounts, but in terms of helping me it cost them nothing to click resteem and it launched my path on this platform. Because of how quickly that helped me grow I realized that Steemit can help people at practically no personal cost to themselves. Suddenly it clicked, I fell in love with the Platform, and realized it's potential to create a system of abundance and generosity.

My next step was to launch a weekly resteem contest as a way to give back. I wanted to help other people grow on the platform, and I knew that visibility was one of the top priorities. I started it on @aggroed, but I starting getting frustrated that it was taking up too many of my posts. So I used anon.steem.network and I created @minnowsupport as an alt.

I also saw the power of combining discord with Steem having started to hang out in SteemSpeak. So, I said look, I have these values of Peace, Abundance, and Liberty and I want to connect with other like minded folks so I built my own server. I shared a post about what we were doing on the block and I also hosted a Discord meetup.

Because of a post and some kind heartedness @benjojo was crazy enough to delegate 75,000 SP to the project. I worked with @inertia to modify his @banjo bot and linked @minnowsupport to a bot in Discord. Now I had a way to help every single person on the chain get a small vote. To the whales they tend to avoid it, but to the minnows it's a lifesaver.

Witness

I started a witness campaign because I wanted to be a bigger part of this platform and spread this message. I new I needed resources to do it. I got a ton of help from @someguy123 and got a server up and running. I've made two main promises. 1. I'll be a better witness than all the dead witnesses above me. 2. I'll support what ultimately became the public charter of the Minnow Support Project; to spread the values of Peace, Abundance, and Liberty, help Steem grow, and help train and retain minnows on the platform. I'm proud of myself that I haven't wavered from those in the slightest.

PALnet exploded

Between the bot, the values, the community, and the service mission we exploded. We got up to a 100 people in a few days. We got up to a 1000 within a month. We got up to 5000 after a few months. We started pruning inactive members and went down to 4,000, and now we're back up to 5,000+ active members. We have hundreds of people in the channel, we have thousands on the server. We have a round the clock witness and mod team.

It's an exceptional amount of work. Posting and pushing projects are two big parts of it, but it's really people management. I'm blessed because we don't have that much conflict, but it's there. I spend a ton of my time deescalating it and trying to help people learn a different way. I spend about 20-40 hours a week doing Steem related things. I'd say 1/2 of any week's activities are straight up people management.

Steem official

Thanks to @timcliff we're Steem official. We're on the welcome page as the new member support group.

mspwaves

I was a college DJ and I loved it. I had the idea that we needed to not just do a podcast, but to have a full internet streaming media station. I worked with some extremely talented people to make it happen, and within a week we had a functional radio station with 18 million songs at our disposal. There's a devoted server just to the radio station, we are nearing two dozen djs, and we're doing great things.

What's next?

The answer is more of the same. This community still needs some organization. I have the reach, a community, and enough respect to pull it off. I think the witnesses need to have some organized meeting times to have round table discussions and I'm going to attempt to put that together. We have some concerns about bid bots and business on the chain. I'd like to establish a Chamber of Commerce. We need more tutorials going on programming so I'll keep sponsering a library. And I'll keep leading efforts within the community to build new tools, share new tools, grow this platform, and help train and retain minnows on it.

Pledges

I'm planning to keep leading the Minnow Support Project as long as the witnesses and moderators will tolerate me doing so.

I plan to keep delegating to project and people that help the Steem and MSP ecosystem. This will range at any given time, but I don't plan to power down more than 10% of my witness earnings, and I hope to keep them piled back into minnows, @minnowsupport, and other community accounts we use to help various projects and causes along the way. I roughly think 10% may be powered down for expenses, 30% on a few bidbots that help minnows, 30% on msp related bots, and the remainder on individual minnows that will do a nice job curating in the community. It'll shift at any given time of the year, but that's my rough outline.

You can help the Minnow Support Project by delegating to it

If you would like to delegate to the Minnow Support Project you can do so by clicking on the following links: 50SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP, 5000SP. Be sure to leave at least 50SP undelegated on your account.