Trip Down Memory Lane: Steem Fest Edition

The date and venue - Bangkok - for SteemFest 4 have been announced. This is a post about why you should go to SteemFest and part of a series launched by @anomadsoul in this post.

I like to do a little Steem business on Saturday mornings. Since I went to SteemFest3, I've got into the routine of buying a little Steem each Saturday, doing a bit of housekeeping on my account and catching up with what's been going on during the week.

This week I've been looking at PAL, the first chance I'd had since reading all the posts and winning 2 PAL in a contest run by @nathen007. I finally got round to claiming my airdrop: 1004 PAL (thank you) and quickly staked everything I had. This is my first post on palnet.io and I've remembered to include the #palnet tag. Let's see what happens.

The biggest fun this morning, though, was learning about pegged Steem (although I'm not sure I could tell you what it is) and experimenting with buying some PAL. I don't get all the little numbers, but I have bought and staked another 25 PAL so I feel like it's been a good morning's work and only 11:09am on the clock.

Here's my Steem Engine wallet with my new PAL tokens and also some nice tokens from @revisesociology and @slobberchops (chops tokens for meaty posts, it says), and rewards for litter picking from @cleanplanet.

I guess I was unusual as a participant at SteemFest3. My employers had paid for me to go, and we had also found some funding to take a colleague with me. I'm the co-ordinator for a consortium of 28 charities in London which, between them, contribute about £40 million each year of jobs and services to London communities. I was sent to SteemFest on a mission: find out what Steem can do for us.

From a personal perspective, I had been investing in Steem for about six months. I was holding something like 6,000 SP by the time SteemFest 3 arrived. I wanted to do a reality check - meet some of the people involved, see what they had to say for themselves - and form some kind of judgment about this crazy crypto blockchain world that I'd fallen into.

I love being involved in the early days of something. Humans are endlessly curious and inventive and I loved seeing the developments on Steem. Some of the things that caught my eye were @adollaraday which provided a vehicle for delegations and donations to support good works around the world and @treeplanter, a community bot, which raised income through vote selling to plant 1,000,000 trees to save and restore Abongphen Highland Forest in Cameroon.

Humans love a bit of drama as well and the Internet amplifies that beautifully. The Steem blockchain is a wonderful microcosm of all the gossip, "upset, belly-aching, crying, blaming, temper-tantrums and other forms of over-the-top drama" (cf @dramatoken on steem-engine.com) that we love to engage in. I'm more of a gleeful spectator than a participant, and I've had plenty of entertainment.

Leaving aside the drama, and the valid arguments about testing code before implementing it, I did enjoy the post-apocalyptic feel of Steem after the last hard fork, waiting until there were enough Resource Credits and the wild swings (and fab post payouts) as the blockchain settled down again. It was the same on the night the blockchain froze (someone had tried to withdraw a negative amount of Steem) and juddered to a halt. There is something about being there when those things happened.

By the time SteemFest 3 came round, we already had @actifit and @dtube and @dsound and @dlike, as well as some others that are already lost and forgotten in the mists of time. I'd been playing with delegations, and between the payouts from DApps and airdrops from various coins, I'd built a fine little portfolio of tokens. It was all fun, and the relentless downward slide of the Steem price just made building my account easier.

I wanted to see, at SteemFest 3, was it something or was it nothing?

Early morning on the River Wisla from the bridge linking the SteemFest hotels.

SteemFest 3 took place over five days, a masterpiece of planning and logistics. There were three hundred people from forty-seven countries, some of whom had travelled thirty-four hours to get there. It could be as full-on and intensive or as mellow and reflective as you wanted it to be.

It was a long time since I had been in one place with so many entrepreneurial, passionate, creative people. At times, the energy and excitement were palpable. At other times, like chatting to people on the river cruise, or with @gillianpearce on a long, slow walk home, it was wonderfully calm and relaxed.

I was impressed by the collective intelligence, the conversations over breakfast, the crazy antics of some of our number (up all day and all night - they couldn't stop enjoying themselves and each other) and the reassurance of well put together presentations, lots of opportunities to talk to people, and simply that people had paid their own way and travelled long distances to take part in this Steem Fest. It was something.

For work, I made contact with @traveller7761 from @impactn, specialists in social impact; and @sorincristescu, also trying to work with a large group of independent actors and help them come to a shared decision.

Since coming home, I've talked with @starkerz and @anarchotech from @oracle-d about how to bring our ideas to fruition. It's a long slow journey, but with £48 billion pa income in the charity sector and another £96 billion in revenue in local government in England, there are huge opportunities for the Steem blockchain.

Source Last, but not least, was the opportunity to make new friends, some of whom met up again recently at SteemCampUK.

Krakow was a wonderful place to visit. I'm sure Bangkok will surpass itself.

You've got to come. You know it makes sense.