Season’s greetings from SteemSTEM and a 2018 status report

in #steemstem6 years ago

2018 was an outstanding year for SteemSTEM. The project, founded 2.5 years ago, is now firmly marching towards its grand goal: allowing for the use of Steem as a science communication medium.

Before summarizing all the team's 2018 accomplishments, we wish all our contributors, supporters, honor members, benefactors and curators our best for the upcoming year.

We will summarize below most of our efforts from 2018. This includes progress in building a STEM community on Steem, the development of our app, what we do in terms of curation and the deployment of our witness and seed nodes.


Community building

Science communication is a vital force worldwide, and we, at SteemSTEM, believe Steem has a significant role to play in this space through SteemSTEM.

To that end we initially focused our attention toward building a community of science and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) lovers on the Steem blockchain.

By community, we consider both actual scientists that could use Steem to directly communicate about their work and state-of-the-art research, as well as passionate STEM enthusiasts that could share their knowledge freely and enthusiastically view and engage with experts and amateur content creators alike.

We believe that Steem can offer STEM professionals and enthusiasts a social media environment that actively promotes and supports them, through SteemSTEM, without having to rely on any middlemen (like journalists) who interpret raw information and oftentimes introduce inaccuracies.

Steem would hence be a primary source of STEM information for mainstream audiences!

In order achieve this goal, SteemSTEM has started to increase our visibility outside Steem and its community. Information needs to be widely spread and we therefore regularly advertise our actions and specific STEM posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We moreover regularly organize meetups in top-notch science places like CERN or Virgo Labs.


The steemstem.io app

Shortly after the summer break, we released our new open source app, steemstem.io, that we believe will become a valuable tool for STEM lovers and researchers to communicate and share information.

Our app is a full interface to Steem, and allows one to undertake any standard action that should be done from a Steem interface. This in particular includes the option to set beneficiaries to a post and to directly delegate some SP to another account.

It chronologically displays English posts carrying the #steemstem tag and approved by the SteemSTEM curation team. The language requirement can be modified (we support the Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Slavic languages providing each sub-community their own custom trending pages), and extra category filters (math, physics, …) can be enforced. The curation requirement can also be removed by the simple click of a button.

Our app finally offers extra exposure to our whitelisted authors and post promotion in the top banner can be purchsed by anyone.

There are still many features to implement before moving away from the beta version of the app, but the to-do list has been reduced by a lot thanks to our one-person development wizard.

In Q1 2019, we plan to continue working out this list, as well as to introduce gamification within the app. We for instance aim to track the best users in terms of engagement, and reward them with a stronger post support and new tokens of appreciations. More details will follow in the coming weeks.


STEM support on Steem and curation

Our curation team searches for original and quality content posted on Steem and related to all STEM fields in seven languages (Chinese, English, French, Italian, German, Slavic and Spanish) through our support to several sub-communities (cn-stem, de-stem, francostem, itastem, stemng, stem-espanol and yu-stem).

Curators decide on the voting strength applied for each qualifying post, this reccomendation is then re-affirmed by a separte curator. Upvotes could be small (5%: encouragement or motivation), medium (20%: informative post on a given topic), standard (65%: post going beyond what could be found elsewhere) or high (100%: information on state-of-the-art research generally not available anywhere else).

Upvotes by the @steemstem account additionally trigger, under certain conditions (usually the best posts), a voting trail consisting of other initiatives like @curie or @utopian-io, as well as generous support from independent curators.

Within this scheme, getting higher support corresponds to bringing something to Steem that cannot be found anywhere else (cutting-edge science, novel and/or non-standard way of presenting a topic, etc.).

On different lines, SteemSTEM has started to build a repository of open-source images that could be requested by authors and used in STEM posts. This initiative, called stem-art, is supported by the SteemSTEM project. We make sure contributing artists are provided a reward for their work.

The picture below summarizes the number of posts and authors that we support since the creation of the project.

In these hard times (let’s say the last three months), the SteemSTEM community includes on a more or less stable basis about 75 authors who write a total of about 100 posts each week.

Taking the entire 2018 year into account, SteemSTEM supported 1341 unique authors who wrote 9906 posts.


Witness and node

SteemSTEM is also proud to play a role in maintaining the Steem blockchain through the deployment of a witness (@stem.witness) and a seed node (seed.steemstem.io:2001) during the last quarter of 2018.


Wishing you all an amazing New Year, we invite you to join our Discord server and stay tuned for more exciting news, soon!


Make sure to follow SteemSTEM on steemstem.io, Steemit, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to always be up-to-date on our latest news and ideas. Please also consider to support the project by delegating to @steemstem for a ROI of 65% of our curation rewards (quick delegation links: 50SP | 100SP | 500SP | 1000SP | 5000SP | 10000SP).

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A year of many ups and downs for steemit. But for steemSTEM was different we have grown enormously thanks to the untiring work of managers, honorary members and curators. In the near future we will achieve all our stated objectives and on behalf of the stem-espanol sub-community I would like to reiterate my thanks for the support received throughout this year. :D

Community-wise, we indeed grow. Our growth is just counted differently: not in terms of money not in terms of massive adoption. Just little by little, good people are gathered and stay together in this boat. Let's see where we will go! :)

I am really happy to see how SteemStem keeps expanding despite of the turbulent flows in steemit. Its a great value to the blockchain and I'm glad to participate. May 2019 be just as interesting and inspiring! 🎉

Keep a head down and keep working I say. :)

Whatever is going on with Steem, we will still be there working hard! Best wishes!

We need more science everywhere in society. Peace

Yeah we do. Sadly we seem to be going in the other direction! The only thing to do is to keep at it :)

Yes we do! Definitely, and especially now!

Happy New Year to everyone in the SteemSTEM team, as well as everyone else who is involved as an author or reader.

I'm glad you guys keep going despite the decreasing value of STEEM, and the decrease in overall activity. I'm excited to see what the new year will bring for SteemSTEM and science on the blockchain!

We are dedicated, and are NOT going anywhere. We've more plans for 2019 :)

Thanks for continuing to release nice content.

The STEMsteem team has shown incredible dedication and I'm excited to see what 2019 brings.

Too many people involved to let down at this stage.

As Rob said, we invested too much to stop now :)

No matter what is going on, we will still be there working hard for making this project a success!

Thanks for still being with us :)

Congratulations to the team on the work you have done through the year. I know it has been a pretty challenging one, with a drop in authors and activity throughout the year.

I would take the author drop more positively: despite low prices, we are somehow constant since 3 months. By the way, many thanks to you to, in particular for still being with us during these hard times :)

It has been a pleasure interacting with steemstem people! My hat goes out to you and Rob for starting this community.

Thanks! ;)

The first thing I did after joining steem blockchain was to search for science articles and communities. I found steemSTEM and that was the best find for me. I am sure that 2019 will be another great year for our community.

Thanks for your nice words that I am totally sharing. We have a lot of surprises for 2019! Let's see where this will bring us.

😍 waiting for the surprises with lots of love!

They will come, in due time (as a SteemSTEM HM, you will know before anyone else ;) ).

Happy new year guys, and keep up the good work.
...
Great Post!
Follow for follow!
Upvote for upvote?

Ah, how I miss the old days...

Ahha! The good old follow-for-follow! It is a long time I haven't seen any of these :)

Happy new year to you as well!

Happy new year SteemSTEM! Much love to all the wonderful members of this awesome community <3

Happy new year to you too

Happy new year to you as well!

Keep up the good work steemstem. Your curation keeps others around.
Happy New Year to you too.

Posted using Partiko Android

Thanks a lot to you as well, and happy new year! We are happy to have people like you around! Good luck with StemQ!

Quite a lot of good things happened in the community in 2018, and I believe that far more greater things would happen in this new year.
We can only get bigger and better.

Season's greetings from this side of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Thanks for your nice words. i am also very confident about 2019! LEt's see where the SteemSTEM path brings us! ;)

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