RE: STE(E)Mposium #0.0 - An explanation and (hopefully) public brainstorm
I think this is a very nice idea and it could work very well. The good part about something like that is that most of the possible answers on your brainstorm questions are going to be something that you could go with. All STEM subjects are interesting and could be great. I guess engineering content needs a bit of a boost in the STEM segment as I feel I see that the least often.
As far as the rewards go, I wouldn't say bot votes are a good way to go as some people avoid them, so those might not want to be rewarded with them either. One of the reward types that stimulate longer-term engagement in the platform is sending rewards as Steem Power instead of Steem or SBD.
I think the best way to decide on winner would be human judges, the thing is you might get so much content that you or your judges might be overwhelmed. I once ran a contest that got moderate to good engagement, but because participation required a real post with real content, I was really swamped with how much work there was to do in order to select a winner. So be weary of that too. Any other metric for selecting the winner would be easy to game.
I agree that engineering and math aren't as "popular" on Steemit, but that could be for many reasons. Hopefully this could help with some of that.
I know what you mean by some people don't like bot votes. I personally feel they are best used to reward other people's content, and not one's own, though I've been known to use them... I like the idea of rewarding SteemPower, though.
The public vote idea, I know, would be incredibly easy to game, and create a sense of unfairness that is already so prevalent here. Going with human judges, I'd like to have a couple for each sub-contest, as I know the volume of content to sift through would take too much from someone's own Steemit time.
Thanks for all your input!
My pleasure! Looking forward to seeing what your idea morphs into in the end. I'd say that the fact that you decided to look for input and wanted to brainstorm together with the community is a really good sign right out of the gate ;)