About the Mesopotamians and how to support us.

Since some people have been out actively promoting the program, I thought it was time to write a little more about what I'm building here and why. (I am @tcpolymath, and right now nearly all of this is being done with my stake.)

The Mesopotamians is a project to build an active middle class on Steem by offering consistent voting support to users who I believe will be excellent dolphins if we can get them there. Some are individual users, some are curation initiatives, but what they all have in common is an interest in growing their accounts so they can be more effective at participating in and building the Steem community.

In order to achieve this I've created a six-stage leveling up system that brings some gamification to the process of powering up. The first level, with the @doctorworm and @particleman accounts, provides a small amount of support to users as they grow to 500 SP.

When they reach that level, they're asked to create a new project with community benefit in order to move to the second level, with the @m-sargon account, which gives a somewhat larger vote in order to help them grow to 1100 SP.

Currently these three are the only accounts operating, but as the users grow I plan to establish the next levels with increasing vote size, and repeat the leveling-up process.

Each account posts twice a week - once to curate the posts made by its users in the previous week and once to provide statistics to the users we're supporting about how their account growth is going. Right now across the program we're supporting 38 users and growing. Plus many of our users are using their own stake to support others, so when we grow them the effect is magnified.

The Mesopotamians is an outgoing support initiative, not a vote-trading scheme or a service. While I'm happy when we receive support from our users, the only requirement is that they continue being excellent Steemians and growing their accounts to become more effective.

Account growth is powered by the accounts voting their weekly curation and stat posts, and by @tcpolymath voting all of them. This leads to about 20% of our voting power going into growing the system, and 80% to supporting the current users.

There's a project roadmap that indicates when I plan to launch new features and levels. Right now the main thing keeping me from expanding the program is that I am doing all of this manually; I'm currently working on automating some of the processes so that eventually the voting and the stats posts will be done for me.

Once that happens I will be opening up the third level, and building toward levels 4-6.

How can I help?

Votes are always great. Everything that powers up the existing accounts helps to lessen the reliance on my delegation, and delegation leases, which means I can eventually use those resources to build the higher levels.

Delegation is also nice, and @davemccoy recently gave us our first. You can delegate to @doctorworm, @particleman, or @m-sargon to support their specific users, listed in the most recent stats post on each account. Or you can delegate to @themesopotamians, which votes for every user in the program.

Each of those accounts also has a curation trail on Steemauto, if you would like to follow their votes. In each case about 20% of the vote will go to building the program.

Eventually I hope that the entire program will be able to run on its own resources and grow to the point where it can support a continual stream of excellent new Steem users and I'll be able to free up my own account to focus on the next thing. (Which I just came up with and is pretty cool.) I can do that with only my stake, in which case it's about a two-year plan. But it would be great to have more support and speed up the process.

Thank you for visiting and reading about what I'm doing here.