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For the last month I enjoyed the thrills and cold shivers you get as a witness here on Steemit. The thrills are coming from the real feeling of contributing and belonging to such an amazing project and the cold shivers, well, you get a few when you miss some blocks, or when your node is not working for reasons known only by the highest entities of the Universe (not you, the mere mortal, mind you) or when you strive to understand the implications of publishing an APR of 5% versus an APR of 12% on the alway elusive, but oh, so cheered and precious SBD.

But, in my opinion, a witness shouldn't be involved only at the technical or financial level. I truly think a witness should implement new ways to support the community, new ways to raise awareness for important changes, new ways to improve the entire ecosystem. Some of the most prominent witnesses have contributed hundreds of hours of coding in the form of libraries, web or mobile apps or spin-offs.

But there's life after coding, you know. There are many other ways in which a witness can improve the ecosystem and one of the most obvious is the content.

From this perspective, I want to propose to all my Steemian fellows a 30 days writing challenge.

We will start on January 1st and we will end on January 30th. The last day of the month will be reserved to the aftermath: what went well, what we learned, what we gained, what we lost.

I did dozens of 30 days challenges in my life. My first month on Steemit was actually a 30 days challenge in which I intended to gather enough information to ponder if the platform is right for me or not. Obviously, it turned out the be right. But I also had challenges which ended up with various healthy habits, like running or switching to a raw food diet.

In this challenge there will be no specific topic, just write about what you know. The detailed rules are below but before that, let me tell you that I intend to audit the challenge myself, by compiling each day an article containing all the articles from the previous days. It will act like a repository and it will also help all of us, including me, to stay accountable.

30 Days Writing Challenge Rules

• keep publishing at least an article per day for 30 days. Obviously.
• signal in the body of the article, somehow, that this post is part of the 30 days writing challenge (can be different every time, or you can use a snipped and copy paste it across posts)
• use these tags: challenge30, then yourMainTag, then theRestOfTheTags. Ex: challenge30 cooking steemit.
• you are NOT required to vote on all the posts from the challenge, if you feel like voting, just go ahead and vote on what you want
• you can join anytime
• if you miss a day, you will not be included in the daily list of articles, but you can pick up the next day

30 Days Writing Challenge Benefits

• exercise discipline
• make January, usually the worst month of the year, mean something
• meet - and potentially interact with - new writers
• increase your revenue by creating more insertion points in the daily reward pool
• contribute to the growth of the community

Please leave a comment with your opinion about that.

I will post another reminder tomorrow, just to make sure you will remember to write your first article.

Let's start 2017 on the right foot, shall we? :)

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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You can also vote for me as witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses