The Benefits of Using Steemit in Writing Competitions

Running writing competitions is one of the many important events that companies, governments, schools, and organizations use to improve their community's writing skills, and promote their advocacy or theme.

I've been thinking about using Steemit in writing competitions and discovered some benefits, which I will share to you.

But first, let's identify what we will need.

NOTE: These are only my thoughts. This isn't backed by research and I am not yet an expert of Steemit. I am certainly open for criticisms.

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What We Will Need

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• A Governing Body
  A governing body is any person or group of people (e.g. institutions, governments, organizations, company, steemians, etc.) who take an interest to run a writing competition for their community.

• An App
  This app will provide the governing body of the competition two functions: (1) a choice as to who will be allowed to participate, and (2) an alarm system. These two functions will provide the limits that every online writing competition must have. The first function will be handy in making exclusive competitions such a worker-to-worker competitions in private companies or intra-school writing contests. The second function will be useful for time limits.

• A highly STEEM-powered entity
  Any person or group of people (i.g. whales, dolphins, persistent early adopters, investors, the governing body of the competition itself) who will buy STEEM to have a high voting power, or use his voting power in upvoting the winners chosen by the governing body. With this, there will no longer be a budget for the awards.

  This highly STEEM-powered entity and the governing body will benefit from each other. The former will be thanked as a sponsor that will result to the development of his network. He will also earn Steem Power. The latter will no longer need to allocate a budget for the awards.

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The Benefits

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• Preserved Entries
  With the Steem Blockchain, all entries, may it be coming from the competitors or the critics, will:
  • never vanish
  • never be hacked
  • always be accessible to its authors or creators.
    In a sense, they are preserved.

• Additional Awards

  • Independent Critic
    • Since it is possible in Steemit to upvote and reward comments, high quality critiques will be encouraged to join, providing a healthier impact to the entrants and to the whole competition. The governing body, as always, will decide who to vote. With this, there will not just be 1 or 2 winners, but many.
  • Popularity

    • With the choice of the governing body to allow all users in the platform to participate in upvoting and commenting the writing competition, a new kind of award is born - the popularity award. The popularity award could represent a different taste compared to what that of the governing body, adding diversity to the competition.

    • The popularity concept could also be used in another way - making it a criterion.

• Automated Checking for Plagiarism
  There are already existing programs built by Steemit developers that automatically check for plagiarism. Having these programs adds confidence to run writing competitions online.

The following benefits are particularly important for large scale yet costly writing competitions. Those that are held by governments in developing countries

• More Confidence and Faster Entry Submission
  Some governments don't hold writing competitions online because they will have to do a lot of things first such as creating a website and making them highly secured. With Steemit and the Steem Blockchain, they will no longer need to do those. Other methods aside from doing it online have slow entry submissions.

• Minimized Cost and Assemblies
  Some governments hold writing competitions by assembling students from the different parts of the nation to a chosen region. However, these assemblies require expenses (i.e. accommodation, food, and transportation costs) not generally related to improving the writing skills of the community. Taking off these large-scale assemblies and then having most of the activities processed online will lessen the total cost. To solve the problem regarding the loss of seminars, the government could just make a quality video and distribute them to all schools for their teachers to discuss them to their representatives.

• More People with Potential will Have the Opportunity to Join
  Due to limited funds, only the best few students from well-known schools can join large-scale competitions made by some governments. This limits the point of a nationwide attempt to influence good writing and to promote their advocacy. Since the cost will be minimized, the government will have more budget in transporting students from more remote schools to join the regional contests.

Photo Sources
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