This is my entry for @anomadsoul's role model contest

Introduction

My name is Owolabi Jeremy and I am the teen with steam for steem. I started writing poems when I was just around 10 (very crappy poems though). With the help and under the tutelage of @baboyed1000 who happened to be my English and Literature teacher in grade 10 and 11, I honed my poetry writing skills and I've metamorphosed into the poet I am today and truly I'm still growing and blossoming into a good poet (if I do say so myself).

I joined the steemit blockchain after I was introduced to it by @tojukaka. Being a teacher at my high school, he knew of my writing ablilities (in prose and poetry) and he felt I could earn good money blogging on steemit. However, after joining steemit, things were not as rosy as I thought they'd be. When I started out on steemit, I mostly wrote poems and it didn't take me long to discover that poets on steemit earn little and are more or less at the bottom of the steemit food(block)chain. We struggle for upvotes and earn cents on good poems despite writing out our hearts. Seeing this, I started participating in a lot of contests and most of what I've earned on steemit was earned through contests.

Gradually, I deviated into storywriting, article writing and I basically just blog about almost anything I lay my hands on. Recently though, my focus has been shifted more towards holding contests and giveaways (on steemit and whatsapp) as a way of giving back to the community. This is because I believe steemit is all about "spreading love on a blockchain".

My projects

For a long time now, I've been desperating looking and thinking of ways to help poets like me on steemit. I've been able to grow to where I am now because I also write fiction, which earns more than poetry. However, some poets do not have the privilege of also being able to double as storywriters. I have held the idea of becoming a poetry curator and host of weekly contests that reward poets. However, I've lacked the funds to do this and I've tried meeting a few people for assistance, but most whales and bigshots hardly reply my messages so there were a lot of dead ends.

Recently, I met a like mind like me, @tony-duke, who took interest in my vision after my poetry appreciation contest got only 3 entries due to the fact that the reward pool of 2 steem was too low to interest anyone. We spoke at length on how to make my contest better and then deviated into how to make life easier for poets on steemit. In the end, we came up with a project called the Poetic-surge.

Poetic-surge: Keeping Poetic Hopes Alive

As earlier mentioned, the poetic-surge is an idea that @tony-duke and I came up with as a solution to the problem of steemit poets like ourselves. It is going to be community of steemit poets. It's all about keeping poetic dreams alive and preventing poets from languishing in the abyss of low posts payout. We'll give a voice to poets here on the platform. We'll come together to help ourselves. Soon, we'll be creating a discord channel and WhatsApp group for the community but in the mean time we're just starting out slow as a partnership of two people.

What Poetic-surge Will be Doing

The Poetic-surge Poetry Contest

The poetry contest will be organised by @tony-duke. A poem with a specific title or theme would be dropped and each participant would write a poem also focusing also on the theme of the dropped poem. The best three will be selected and will be rewarded according to the reward pool for that edition as we plan to keep growing the reward pool. Then the best of the three selected poems would be use for the next week contest which would be a poetry appreciation contest.

The Poetry Appreciation Contest

The poetry appreciation contest is a midweek contest that would be hosted weekly by me @ajremy. A poem will be given out on a weekly basis and people would have the chance to appreciate (explain) the poem. The winners would win prizes of sbd or steem. Also, every entry into the contest would be upvoted by both @tony-duke and I.

Poetic-surge Curation

From time to time, we will be involved in curating good poetry in order to help steemit poets grow. We'll explore the poetry tag in search of good poems which we will upvote as well as drop comments to encouraged such poets not to give up. As the community grows, we may enroll the help curators to help out with picking out poems but for now, @tonyduke and I would be doing it. In the future, as we grow, we may have a curation trail to further enhance our efficiency but that's just the least of our long term plans

Poetry Picks

Each week, five outstanding poems will be selected for a shortlist for special curation and the poets who wrote them would receive a reward of sbd or steem.

How I would Use the SP if I Win

If you've been reading this post up till now, I'm sure the answer is not far-fetched to you. I'll be using the sp to help poets on steemit if I win. I'll upvote as many poets who I feel deserve it, as well as people who participate in my contests. Getting the delgation would really enhance our plans and make the poetic-surge a big possibility. It would go a long way in helping us help poets here on steemit.

How I Currently Spend my Voting Power

Despite the fact that my 100% upvote is worth just about 0.10 cents, I always endeavour to upvote as many posts as I can in a day. I always give my 100% upvotes to posts I love. I don't upvote as much as I love to because my phone (a 2012 model of samsung galaxy grand) hangs and crashes a lot, limiting me, but as much as I can I upvote posts. I also use bidbots such as minnowbooster to boost posts I really love when I feel my 0.10 dollar worth of upvote is not enough to reward the author.

Eric's Criteria

Is not permanently Powering down - nothing wrong with powering down a few weeks if you need money, but permanently powering down means you don´t trust the platform and are not very committed to Steemit.

I've never done a single power down since I joined steemit in August last year and I've powered up about 100 steem till date.

Posts original and quality content - quality is subjective, but we all have a certain standard.

I don't really know your standard for quality but if you mean quality poems, stories, articles and contest entries, then yes!

Cites sources whenever part of the content does not belong to her/him.

I always do this if not for any other reason but to avoid cheetah

Tries to reply to the comments on his/her posts (I have to do this more often, bad Eric)

I reply to every comment on my post that is not a spam and then reply to replies when necessary

Comments on other people´s posts and gives some feedback to the author.

I endeavour comment on posts and give feedback to authors as much as possible. I also comment on other people's comments on such posts at times.

Does not selfvote more than once a day.

I hardly post more than once in a day so I selfvote my single post

Does not use bidbots to get votes - nothing wrong to use them once in a while to boost a good post or to promote an initiative or project, but come on, not on every post.

I used bidbots to get votes for others more than I do for myself

Spreads his/her votes as wide as he/she can within their SP posibilities.

I give as many posts as possible a 100% upvote

Hangs out in some chat channels regularly.

Since the steemit.chat is rather slow and discord doesn't work on my phone, I'm limited to whatsapp. Currently I'm in 4 whatsapp groups, one of which is mine.

Approves at least 10 witnesses (30 would be better but well).

I voted the 20 witnesses I approve

I hope I meet every criteria

Another Role Model Steemian

I was almost done writing when I noticed @anomadsoul edited the contest announcement to include that you can nominate others. I see no reason not to nominate my partner, @tony-duke, because if we both win the delegation our combined upvotes would become higher and we would be able to reward more poets, individually and as a team.

@tony-duke is a great steemit poet and a man with a heart like mine to help other poets. He's a selfless person and is one of the few people that took interest in my vision to help poets. Once I made a call for sponsors and he was the only one who responded to my call despite the fact he doesn't have that much. In the end we've become partners and I believe that together we can make a change.

If both of us were to win the 500sp delegation, it would throw our joint sp up to about 1500sp which would really increase the power of our joint upvotes and increase the quality of upvotes we can give to help steemit poets as well as the number of poets we can upvote daily.

To learn more about the agenda of the poetic-surge and how you can help us, read;

The poetic-surge by @ajremy

Steemit poetry campaign by @tony-duke

We hope @anomadsoul gives both or one of us this delegation because it would go a long way in helping the whole poetry community on steemit.

Together, we can give steemit a poetic surge!

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with love
@ajremy, the teen with steam for steem