People of Utopian #8 - @deathwing

The current Public Relations Manager at Utopian.io is a shy gamer from Turkey who shares his life with an angry bird, loves food and hopes to see Utopian.io in Forbes Magazine. Meet @deathwing, one of the oldest and most involved members of the Utopian.io team.

On Github: https://github.com/xDeathwing

Who are you, @deathwing?

I am one of those people who prefer to remain anonymous on the Internet so you all just know me as Deathwing. I live in Turkey and my main interest is language. I love languages and I am currently studying English/American Literature and Culture.

Being an acid games and huge fan of Strategy games, I probably played all familiar Strategy games up to this date (with some notable ones being Command and Conquer, Warcraft and Starcraft series, also the classic; Age of Empires) and some Action/MOBA from time to time. I wanted to be professional gamer for a long time but I discovered that interacting with people while playing was more fun than actually playing the games. So I found myself moving from "playing the game" to “engaging in it”.

I have a small, cute but very angry cockatiel named Lemon. He’s not a great model, but he tries.

Something everyone on the Utopian.io team knows about me is that I love eating! I just love food! I love cooking too but not nearly as much as eating - eating is always better than cooking because, well, less work involved and I am a huge meat lover. So if you know some different Utopian-grade (see what I did there?) tastes, do let me know!

What led you to Utopian.io?

I joined Steem in its early stages and I wasn't keen on using it at first. What I found interesting about the Steem blockchain was that it was both a scary and magnificent system, that let people earn money by just writing in little blogs.

After searching for ways to take part I found that the niche of “normal” blogs was full of people who had thousands of STEEM and SP. As a user with 15 delegated SP, it was intimidating so I left the site for a while. A few months later, in October or November, I decided to check the site again. On the trending feed, I saw a Utopian.io post. Curious, I clicked and read it. One thing led to another, and here we are.

I started out as a translator on Utopian.io. When the SBD price started to spike to about $13, the number of translation contributions probably quadrupled (if not even more than that). While I was working really hard to ensure that everything was translated properly, people were using machine translation tools like Google Translate and were trying to reap the rewards of machine work. I found this upsetting and realized the cause was a short-handed staff and a shortage in Turkish moderators along with an influx of Turkish and Indonesian translations. I wrote to @omersurer and asked if I could help, having worked as a translator before and having fluent English. He directed me to Ruah who was quick to recruit me as a moderator.

Before long, I found myself a team Supervisor, and then Community Manager of the Tutorials category in January 2018. After six months in that role, I stepped down from Community Manager position and switched to a core team role of Public Relations Manager. Now I work with my boss(es) @espoem and @techslut to ensure the community is active and engaged with Utopian.io content and activities.

Your current role in the organization is Public Relations Manager. What does it entail, and why do you think you’re the man for the job?

While I don’t tend to reveal too much personal information, I consider myself a really social person and I love talking with others. I wanted to use these skills to help Utopian.io directly, and without being limited to the Tutorials category. In addition, I felt I could do more than just oversee a category, especially since we had two community managers for it, and not enough work to justify paying us both.

As Public Relations Manager I ensure our AI Utopy works as it should, help organize contests and raffles on the Utopian.io Open Source Radio Show, manage partner relationships and a lot more work will be coming as the platform grows and we will have an active front-end. In addition, my help is sometimes needed in preparing blog posts for the various Utopian.io publications, so I assist @techslut in writing, proofreading and preparing the content for publishing as part of the content team.

What would you say is your favorite thing about Utopian.io?

How inclusive it is. Everyone can participate, whether they know coding or not and everyone has a skill to offer. People can apply skills like translation, copywriting, visual arts and teaching through tutorials, and be rewarded for their efforts.

I love how everything works. Everyone on the team knows what to do for their specific categories and how to manage it through the good and bad times. To me Utopian.io is like an online family. Even though most of us haven't met in real life (yet), Utopian.io is a place I could probably call a family still. When we’re not working, we always chat with each other for fun, whether it’s about food, candy, and how to bother our CEO @elear in many different ways. ;)

Even though we hit some roadblocks in the past, hurting our brand reputation, we always look forward to thrive.

How do you see the future of Utopian.io and where would you like to see yourself in it?

I believe that through hard work by Utopian.io users and the team, we will be a stable, always-improving, super active place for GitHub projects and their contributors. I am actually happy where I am right now. I like my work and I like people who are working with me. This is literally a dream job come true and I hope to see our company in Forbes Magazine in the near future. To achieve this goal we all have to work together. Ad victoriam ad infinitum.

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