CryptoCoffeeChat Episode 7 : Thinking Outside of the Box with @mcfarhat

This is my seventh in a series of blogs where I talk to a Crypto/Steemit Enthusiast over Coffee

On this occasion I was speaking to @mcfarhat at sort of around noon /1pm sort of ish time. {who invented this Daylight Saving Time confusion anyway!}

It was very cool to have a great video call with @mcfarhat who happened to be at one of his corporate client headquarters about 0.5km outside of the centre of Beirut in Lebanon and myself, I was located at CryptoCurator HQ about 321km outside of London!

What immediately struck me about our conversation was the live entrepreneurial and prospector spirit – I just knew that this man was persistently Thinking Outside of The Box
Read on and I’ll tell you why.......and here I briefly sum up our conversation in the following sections:

1. The First Steemian to Spring Up in Lebanon
2. Dev work & Utopian.io
3. The Plug In
4. Arab Steem Community
5. Promo-Steem & Steem-Ambassadorship for @mcfarhat

Introduction

@mcfarhat has a background of web development, portals and apps and joined by virtue of learning about Steemit initially from seeing the Steem currency on coinmarketcap.com. @mcfarhat joined in August 2017 and is a big fan of SteemStem, Utopian.io, Promo-Steem, ArabSteem, Fitness and Healthy Food and is also a thoroughly devoted Chocolate Addict, Husband and Father.

The First Steemian in Lebanon

It looks highly likely that @mcfarhat was the first person to register in his country. NOW that in my book is first class leading “Frontierland Behaviour” - being the first one to break out of the traditional boundaries.

No one has said otherwise and given the research he has personally done – I think he could quite happily, without any quarrel, self-title himself The First Steemian of The Lebanon!

He was the first to spring up but he is now building a community in Lebanon mostly by 1:1 encouragement, and it’s soon time to watch this space time for the inaugural Lebanese Meet Up (I’d like to bet there is a nice spread of food on! - In fact I’m almost tempted to fly in!).

Some of the efforts described below of steemit promotion through social media means the news of this great platform is spreading and @mcfarhat is seeing more and more Steemians registering across in Algeria and Morocco aswell.

SteemStem, Utopian.io & Open Source

@mcfarhat had a big interest in science and found early rewards in posting and connecting with the #SteemStem community and more recently has become a very valued member of the Utopian.io community. He is now a supervisor and has moderated for quality, accuracy and eligibility over 500 Utopian Contributions.

For those who don’t know so much about Utopian.io - I would encourage you to check out the Utopian.io website to find out more about the open source economy where contributors get paid in STEEM for a variety of work across many workstreams including development work, tutorials, graphic design, bug hunting, copywriting and many more tasks.

The most interesting thing to me here was the fact that @mcfarhat visualises a massive opportunity with Utopian to be a new gateway to bring in a completely new set of people onto the platform ie. where non-steemian open source voluntaryists could be encouraged to join Steemit/Utopian and get rewarded for their valued work!

GK Steemit Info – Plug In

Here is a perfect example of bringing new stuff to the table. @mcfarhat is thinking laterally about how entrepreneurs / web developers might want to use Steemit on their wordpress websites.

He has developed the GK Steemit Info Plugin aimed at providing a multitude of steemit related data and information into the desired domain via widgets and shortcodes.

The plug in works by connecting to the steemjs API, pulling/sending the required info. Steem price info is pulled from coinmarketcap API. The growth potential for this plugin is limitless. The plugin aims to serve as great promotional tool for steemit, to hopefully lead to large-scale adoption, of wordpress users and/or website visitors, to join and use steemit.

And here is a bit more of a technical description from the main man himself: with his most recent development updates post about the wordpress plugin:
https://utopian.io/utopian-io/@mcfarhat/more-features-to-wordpress-steemit-plugin-gk-steemit-info-0-6-0

Arab Steem Community

I’m going to keep this as highlights as there is an excellent summary here.
@mcfarhat is whipping up enthusiasm and encouragement in the arab world and has focussed efforts on:

1. Setting up @arabsteem account which has benefited from some delegated SP from @stellabelle and @mcfarhat and is a close knit community centred around promoting, rewarding quality posts in the arab world. [400 followers]
2. Setting up arabsteem discord channel with the help of @khaled-dz (Algeria) and @mokh-tar (Algeria) [250+ members]
3. Creating collateral graphics, and social media/ facebook posts with the help of @accro and @alfamano
4. Regular intense daily curation of quality posts on arabsteem
5. Developing a profit only bot “Arabpromo” to help new users from the arab world

There is a steely determination in promotion to the arab world, and a focussed encouragement of quality posts by way of upvoting from both the @mcfarhat and @arabsteem accounts.

Promo-Steem & Steem-Ambassadorship

As you can tell from my graphic above @mcfarhat will be the only @Steem-Ambassador in the Middle East- and is actually the closest Ambassador to parts of Eastern Europe. Despite being a very busy man with his respective intellectual interests – he has some great plans for Ambassadorship:

1. The first Lebanese Meet Up in Beirut
2. Boosting/Encouraging quality promo-posts from the Arab World
3. Bringing more people to the platform via quality 1:1 Meetings
4. Introducing the Open Source Dev Community in Lebanon to Utopian.io
5. Growing ArabSteem Community on Steemit, Facebook and Discord

As you can see @mcfarhat is clearly an innovator, he is consistently thinking outside of the box and he is already a very valued member of the @Steem-Ambassador team. I wish him all the best with community building in the arab speaking world and I watch with interest for both the dev developments he blogs about – but also to capture some outstanding breakfast ideas that he regularly blogs about too!!

Thanks for your time @mcfarhat and for leading the way in Thinking Outside of the Box!!!

Links

Please check out the @mcfarhat blog for up-to-date news on the efforts to promote Steem and Steemit in the arab world – and here is his Steem-Ambassador application for further background.

CryptoCoffeeArchives

Here are my past episodes with the King of #TeamMalaysia @bitrocker2020 here, The Prince of Borneo @Danieldoughty here, @Pennsif here, Red Dayou @Steemitph here, @samstickkzhere, @anarcotech here. The archive collection covers Promo-steem work in Malaysia, Borneo, Wales, Philippines, Nigeria and the UK.