Season’s greetings from SteemSTEM and a 2018 status report

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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_{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).}