Introducing Merasteem: The hub for creative minds, now live

Repository

https://github.com/merasteem/merasteem.git

Preface

Humans have always found something to make their life better and have shared it with others to make profits off of it. In a way, you can say that humans have that creative itch that has allowed us to have so many innovative products available to us in these modern times.

Only humans have the capabilities to question everything around them. Even the simplest of questions gave us opportunities to explore most of the dimensions of innovation. From clothes made out of the animal skin to fashionable & high-end clothes, from stone wheels to exploring the deep space, we have achieved so many more things in this small amount of our time on earth, but we still are hungry for more.

Now, let us consider that you can find all of the innovations online, but are they appropriately documented? What if you want to know how it was done, step by step? I bet if you are a novice explorer of innovations and ideas, you would be having difficulties in finding all the details to make something on your own because most of the things that you can see at one place are either not well presented or do not have complete information.

In your journey of exploring innovative ideas and creating the next big thing, we have come up with a new platform where you can explore ideas and make something on your own. This is the information age, and nobody can now give excuses for not learning something new. So why not become expert at everything you touch?

You only live once, so why not become whatever you want to be? Learn any skill you want to develop from experts from different fields, and become a techy today, and maybe a chef tomorrow.

What is Merasteem?

MeraSteem is a community project built on the Steem Blockchain, with the aim to provide a platform for user-created innovative do-it-yourself project ideas. The MeraSteem community is built to support creative project ideas collectively and help grow the Steem ecosystem. Once registered, contributors can create meraprojects that are step-by-step descriptions of innovative projects they want to share online. Our predefined templates and guidelines make sure that all of the contributions are written in such a way that they can easily be replicated by explorers, and shared with the rest of the community.

Why Merasteem?

Everyone has something to share. We all have secret skills; whether it's a recipe for the best smoothie or the safest way to use a tool to build something new, even the simplest ideas are worth sharing. MeraSteem aims to bring people of various sets of skills together and is dedicated to step-by-step collaboration among contributors to build a variety of innovative do-it-yourself projects.

How Merasteem will achieve its objectives?

Developing countries have recorded a high increase in the number of internet users in the past few years, most of them are searching for alternatives of earning money while still doing what they love to do the most. MeraSteem aims to take advantage of these statistics, to better enhance and develop the Steem ecosystem.

Categories - More categories to be added later

We have come up with these categories because most of the traffic for the do-it-yourself niche goes around these topics. Each topic has its significance in the DIY community. Most of the people engaged in the DIY activities are associated with one of the categories listed below. If you want us to add more categories, please join our discord (link is given below). Each category has many sub-categories that contributors can choose from.

1. Crafts - art, beads, cards, clay, crochet, embroidery, fashion, gifts, jewelry, knitting, leather, mason jars, paper, printmaking, sewing, vase,
2. Food - bbq-grilling, beverages, bread, breakfast, candy, cake, cookies, cupcakes, dessert, homebrew, main-course, pasta, pickles, pie, pizza, preserves, salad, sandwiches, snacks, soup-stew, vegetarian,
3. Home - beauty, cleaning, decorating, eco-friendly, education, gardening, Halloween, holidays, homesteading, kids, kitchen, life-hacks, organizing, pets, reuse, travel, yoga,
4. Technology - 3d-printing, Arduino, assistive-tech, audio, clocks, computers, electronics, gadgets, laptops, lasers, LEDs, microcontrollers, mobile, raspberry-pi, reuse, robots, science, sensors, software, speakers, tools, wireless,
5. Workshop - cars, electric-vehicles, furniture, home-improvement, home-theater, laser-cutting, lighting, metalworking, molds-casting, motorcycles, organizing, pallets, repair, solar, tools, woodworking, workbenches,

Who can contribute to @merasteem?

If you are passionate about creating something you love and want to earn for doing so, then, MeraSteem is for you. We offer a wide range of categories, to help suit user’s unique set of skills. We plan on expanding the categories available to accommodate more diversified and skilled Steemians, and potential Steemians into our platform.

Weekly Contests

Contests will be held each week, with each category having its contest. We pick entries with the highest scores manually. Scores are given by one of our moderators following the guidelines and rules, and prizes are awarded to the winners. Rewards are assigned based on sponsor availability.

Why Merasteem needs your support?

To create a sustainable environment for innovative ideas and easy to replicate projects, we need support from the steem community to make this project a success. In the first few months of our operations, curation will be done manually to make sure the contributions made are of high quality.

Project milestone/Features

1. Weekly Contests: From the first week itself, we will be rewarding the best content posted through our platform, do not worry, runner-ups also get rewarded here.
2. Guild Feature: As promised, we have plans to support guild feature, where people can work on a project with other contributors using the guild feature to come up with more interesting project ideas.
3. Partner with local businesses to get sponsorships for different projects started by our contributors.

Security

We are putting our users' privacy and security as our top priority, and we have no plans to store user’s keys in our databases. The authentication would be aided by SteemConnect, so your keys are safe and are not sent to our server. If our server is being attacked, your account is safe from any attack. He will have no access to your account; thus, your funds and keys are safe. Your tokens/keys are encrypted and stored on your browser.

Join Our large community.

The merasteem community is one of the most welcoming and supportive DIY community out there. Connect with other explorers and creators and get involved! You might be surprised how good you'll feel. Putting your creative ideas out there can be potentially rewarding.

We need moderators

To verify that only quality content is posted on our platform, we need moderators for each category. Only people with more than five quality contributions will be able to apply for moderators.

Join us on discord

We have created a discord server for MeraSteem community where we can interact, share ideas and feedback.