This week’s update includes some exciting news about the upcoming beta of the future Utopian.io frontend, new member to the VIPO club, necessary changes and updates to the voting bot behavior and scoring scheme, a unique bounty assignment process for task requests, and some updates on our @fundition campaign with SteemSTEM and the upcoming meetup of the two groups in Italy this September.

In this update:

• Utopian.io v2 Beta pre-registration
• Actifit joins the Utopian.io VIPO club
• Voting queue optimized
• Questionnaire and scoring scheme updates
• SteemSTEM and Utopian.io Meetup Fundition campaign
• Unique task bounty assignment process with @utopian.tasks

Utopian.io v2 Beta Pre-Registration

After weeks of tireless work, the brand new Utopian.io frontend is almost ready for you! Want to be the first to see it and help us test the system before the beta is public? Fill out the pre-registration form for the beta, and you might just get the chance to be the first to test drive the new Utopian.io and help us make it perfect for public launch.

We will be collecting the candidate applications for the beta over this upcoming week, and by next Friday the beta-testers chosen will be notified.

Welcoming Actifit to the Utopian.io VIPO

Have you ever wanted to be rewarded for physical activity? With Actifit, you can!

We are delighted to welcome another innovative Steem application to the Utopian.io VIPO Club - Actifit. Developed by none other than our own Utopian.io team member @mcfarhat, the project aims to help users get in shape and make a few tokens while doing it. By creating their own token ACTIFIT (currently as ERC20 tokens which will be swapped with SMTs once they are implemented and released on the Steem blockchain), this brilliant app rewards users for reported activities.

Using Actifit is easy. All you need to do is install the Android app and you can start tracking your sport activity (and getting rewarded). Tokens can be obtained by submitting the reports with the Actifit app to the Steem blockchain. Furthermore, tokens are distributed to delegators as well, so everyone wins when you sweat.

Everything you need to know to join this new initiative can be found in their recent announcement. Time to get moving!

Utopian votes

With the integration of the Utopian.io Innovation Trail to support innovative curation initiatives on the blockchain, we found ourselves juggling voting power to ensure contributors are rewarded in a fair and timely fashion without pausing the trail voting activity. To better make use of our voting power and ensure it is fairly distributed, we’ve made some minor changes to the behavior of our voting bot.

Vote order

So far, @utopian-io voted on reviewed contributions in an order according to the score received in the moderator’s review. While we continue to strive to reward the very best, the community has to offer the open source ecosystem, we’ve decided to change the sorting criteria to include the date of creation of the post, rather than the date of review. We hope this will result in more contribution being rewarded sooner, giving them additional visibility and attracting more votes from the community.

Curation trail support

To ensure our voting power is kept first and foremost for you, the contributors, we’ve adjusted the Utopian.io Innovation Trail script to trigger only when the voting power of @utopian-io is equal or higher than 99%. If it is lower, the trail will be suspended for 2 hours to recover the VP, then resume voting. To keep most of the votes to follow, the bot keeps track of curation trail votes for 2 days.

Questionnaire

The questionnaire used by moderation to evaluate the contributions on daily basis is one of the most important tools our team uses daily. As we constantly work to improve and optimize it to reflect the value of the work done by the contributor, we’ve updated the questionnaire and score values for some of our categories.

This week, we looked at the translations and graphics categories, in both cases focusing mostly on the point system. We hope to complete this round of updates with the other categories over the next few days.

As always, we appreciate your feedback, and would like to hear from you which aspects of our review system we should focus to make it better and clearer for everyone to make use of.

Fundition campaign

The planned meetup with Utopian.io and SteemSTEM in Italy still needs your support to cover expenses. The recent updates cover the number of confirmed attendees in the VIRGO labs, as well as the overview of the countries the members come from and the age distribution. An additional update including some information on the places we plan to visit was published as well, and more are to follow to tell you all about the observatory and gravitational waves.

You can catch up on all the news in this latest post published by @steemstem.

Task Request Bounties

To better cater to the needs of project owners and preferences of contributors, Utopian.io has come with a different concept of rewarding the completion of task requests.

Up until now, all the task requests held only little of the rewards for the task solvers and the majority of the rewards were distributed as the contributors submitted their work in Utopian. Utopian is experimenting with concentrating the rewards at the task assignment and when a solver comes up with the desired solution for the task, the rewards will be sent to them in the form of a liquid STEEM bounty.

One of the recent examples of this new approach is a task request on documenting and describing steps needed to run private Steem network. This task request by the Blockchain Competence Centre of the European commission is also unique for other reasons. It was published using the Utopian account for the project, and it is one of the first steps in building a new project through tasks rather than enhancing an existing one.

Don’t miss the opportunity to be a part of this unique project, and check the task request at @utopian.tasks where the assignment was published in full.

First Time Contributing in Utopian.io?

Learn how to contribute on our website

Utopian Witness

Vote for our witness!

This page is synchronized from the post: Utopian Weekly - [July 20th 2018] - Beta Testing Utopian v2, Optimizing Rewarding Process, Actifit Join VIPO and more

The Weekly Top of Utopian showcases Staff Picks from contributions made in the past week, hand-selected by our Community Managers from across all Utopian.io categories.

This week, we’ve selected the best from bug-hunting, tutorials, video tutorials, ideas, graphics and blog categories. As always, we are grateful to our wonderful contributors for providing us with high-quality contributions and to our moderators for spotting them. We hope these examples of stellar work will inspire you to strive to appear in the next Top of Utopian.io Staff Picks collection.

Staff Picks

comment.upvote doesn’t work on some cases at Beem by @emrebeyler [bug-hunting]

Beem is a Python library dedicated for Steem developers created by @holger80. This project has been developing rapidly, and we can see updates to it made almost every day, often as a result of reports submitted to the project. One of these reports, by @emrebeyler, describes a bug in the commenting functionality. One of the methods for the Comment class did not work as expected in all cases. Any attempt to upvote a comment or a post would fail if it was not upvoted by someone else previously. @emrebeyler has written a clear report and included a demo script to reproduce the issue, pointing out the exact cause of the problem.

Total payout: 46.22 STU Number of votes: 189

New website for Steemax by @outwork [graphics]

Steemax is a simple web-based app to help Steem users reward each other under the conditions they set. This contribution helped the project to have a cleaner interface for people to use. The work done by @outwork offered a full and functioning design, and was chosen by the both the project owner and graphics category moderators.

Total payout: 129.49 STU Number of votes: 19

Steemblr development update 05 - Theme Editor by @snwolak [development]

Steemblr is an open source microblogging Tumblr inspired platform built on the Steem blockchain. In this detailed contribution @snwolak is back with another amazing update with a new feature that allows users to customise the look and feel of their own blog. It’s definitely worth checking out!

Total payout: 178.36 STU Number of votes: 139

Creating RPC Server on Web Browser - part 1: Serving incomplete HTML file by @drsensor [tutorials]

Another of @drsensor’s fantastic and research-quality tutorials, it is the first part in a series about setting up an RPC server. The tutorial is written with high professionalism, great detail, animated gifs that properly illustrate the stages of the process describes. We are looking forward to learning more in the next part of the series.

Total payout: 97.56 STU Number of votes: 103

#1 Promoting Open Source on SteemHunt - How To find OS products & Grow Your Audience by @rosatravels [blog]

This great post from @rosatravels is a detailed guide for project hunters in the open source world. She introduces the way to promote new and mostly unknown projects via Steemhunt, and includes a resource list to guide hunters in finding new projects. As an experienced project hunter, she also shares her knowledge on how to reach the right audience and build your project hunting career. This is a must-read for project hunters!

Total payout: 98.35 STU Number of votes: 56

Intro to Rust Web Assembly with Rust’s Wasm Bindgen Library by @tensor [video-tutorials]

Another excellent video tutorial from @tensor, the first in a series, gives us a beginner’s look into building a library using Rust as he digs into the various tools of the Wasm Bindgen library. The tutorial is very well paced and @tensor provides insight into each function and tool he presents, including background information and practical application throughout the entire lesson.

Total payout: 108.35 STU Number of votes: 54

SteemPlus 2.18 - Maximum available SP for delegation is inaccurate in busy by @josephace135 [bug-hunting]

image by @steem-plus

Steem-plus is a simple browser extension for popular Steem-based apps (e.g busy.org, utopian.io, steemit.com). It provides additional features for this applications to enhance the user experience. In this contribution, @josephace135 was able to spot a bug in the steem-plus delegation functionality, causing an incorrect value to be displayed in the interface. @josephace135 provided the technical details and steps needed to reproduce the issue to ensure it was clear to the project owner and guided them toward the necessary fix.

Total payout: 43.32 STU Number of votes: 21

Affix of Weight value, Item Quantity, Stock auto-save, Import, Open file with Inventory and Edit on Inventory by @tykee [ideas]

Inventory is a simple docket mobile application that allows users to weigh and categorise data, and data saved can be exported/saved to an external device. This post by @tykee suggests a number of necessary feature for the app that can bring a great deal of improvement to app usability. The post by @tykee is well thought out, structured and makes a lot of sense to implement.

Total payout: 51.71 STU Number of votes: 16

Distribution of SteemPower and Reward Pool share across Bid-Bots, dApps and Communities by @crokkon [analysis]

This is another well-conducted statistical analysis on the usage of bid-bots, dApps and other communities on the steem blockchain, studying the distribution of active Steem Power on the platform. This contribution gives an insightful overview of the impact of these services on reward allocations on the blockchain.

Total payout: 152.60 STU Number of votes: 89

Utopian.io Post Statistics

The staff picked contributions are only a small (but exceptional) example of the mass of contributions reviewed and rewarded by Utopian.io.

• Overall, the last week saw a total of 252 posts, with 179 of them rewarded through an upvote by @utopian-io.
• In total, Utopian.io distributed an approximate of 11033.20 STU to contributors.
• The highest payout seen on any Utopian.io contribution this week was 457.679 STU, with a total of 97 votes received from the community.
• The contribution that attracted the most engagement was DBlog.io - Decentralized Blogging Platform - Backend improvement, with no less than 9 comments in its comment threads.
• The average vote given by Utopian.io was worth 61.64 STU.

Category Statistics

|Category|Reviewed|Rewarded|Total rewards|Top contributor| |:-|:-|:-|-:|:-| |bug-hunting|26|14|327.94 STU|@mightypanda| |graphics|43|28|1568.99 STU|@zuur| |development|49|40|3284.35 STU|@mkt| |translations|73|56|3574.02 STU|@robertbira| |video-tutorials|4|4|331.28 STU|@tensor| |blog|11|9|549.64 STU|@rosatravels| |analysis|5|4|376.20 STU|@lokomotion| |ideas|10|3|81.99 STU|@alejandrofz| |copywriting|1|1|53.08 STU|@harry-heightz| |tutorials|25|16|806.95 STU|@steempytutorials| |documentation|1|1|33.75 STU|@kit.andres|

First Time Contributing in Utopian.io?

Learn how to contribute on our website

Utopian Witness

Vote for our witness!

This page is synchronized from the post: Weekly Top of Utopian.io: July 12 - 18

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.

Utopian Witness

Vote for our witness!

This page is synchronized from the post: People of Utopian #8 - @deathwing

Yet another super-busy week at Utopian.io! As expected, this week we were juggling preparations for the team gathering and SteemSTEM meetup in planned to take place in Italy this September alongside development of the new frontend and other activities. In this week’s Utopian.io weekly we have even more details on the Utopian.io & SteemSTEM collaboration and meetup, inspiring new projects added to the VIPO Club and Innovation Trail, updates on the Translations category expansion progress, and more.

In this update:

• Utopian & SteemSTEM Meetup Fundition Campaign
• New VIPO Club Members
• Translations Category Growth
• Utopian.io at the @sndbox Crypto Renaissance Exhibition Website

Utopian.io & SteemSTEM Meetup Fundition

As announced last week, we are planning to have the first ever Utopian.io meetup in Italy. In collaboration with SteemSTEM, we will be visiting the Virgo Labs, having an exclusive mini-hackathon and more.

If you would like to join our group visit to Virgo Labs be sure to hurry and secure your spot by contacting @suesa on SteemSTEM Discord.

Bringing dozens of people from all over the world to one place is no easy (or cheap) task. To help our team members flying in from Asia, Africa and Latin America, fund their trip, and to create awesome content for you from our adventure, we’ve launched a Fundition.io campaign.

As the campaign progresses, we’ll be publishing updates and sneak-peeks at the events planned on this five-day science and tech extravaganza of Steemians in Italy.

Welcoming New Very Important Project Owners (VIPOs)

Our exclusive club of FOSS projects, enabling the access to free professional services and a unique support system to Open Source projects of all sizes, continues to attract additional projects and initiative looking to empower their project through Utopian.io. This week, we’d like to highlight two newcomers to the club: Byteball and Steemer.

Byteball

Byteball is an open source block-free cryptocurrency platform. They’ve been focused on the development of the whole project, and feel now is the time to expose to the masses.

We welcome their choice of the Steem ecosystem as they’ve worked hard to bridge between the Steem blockchain and the Byteball platform. Not only is the platform successful in achieving the goals set by the developers, but it is also a clear example of how two large platforms can complement one another and collaborate to achieve mutual goals.

You can read more about Byteball, and the team’s plan to attract Steem users to Byteball in their recent post and also in an official Steemit blog post welcoming the Byteball team to Steem.

It is our great pleasure and honor to welcome Byteball to the VIPO club, giving our community of contributors a clear and direct path to making contributions to improve the platform even further. As the team aims for platform mass-adoption, translators are of need on this project. Of course, one cannot forget the building pillars of a project: the development team and software testers.

If you are interested in contributing to this amazing project, contact @punqtured and he will give you all necessary information for you to join the forces and start working on tasks. Official tasks requests will be published in the following weeks and resteemed on @utopian.tasks to give you the maximum information necessary to contribute to the project.

Joining the Steem blockchain, the Byteball team prepared a pleasant surprise for all users - they announced a free airdrop for all Steemians! Linking your Steem account with a Byteball wallet will give you an advantage in sending funds to your Steem comrades as you will not have to send funds to long and hard-to-remember addresses.

You can earn your first Bytes depending on your current reputation. The attestation rewards are as follows:

| Reputation | Reward | |-|-| |30+|$10| |40+|$20| |50+|$40| |60+|$80| |70+|$160|

If you would like to have more information and join the airdrop you can visit this link.

Steemer

Steemer is a mobile app for interacting with the Steem blockchain. The developer, @hispeedimagins, has been working on the app for some time and he would like to increase the number of app users. In other words, he welcomes advertisers who would help with spreading the word about this app on the blockchain and beyond. Furthermore, the app has been released in the Google Play last week, so give it a try and share your new ideas, features that you would like to see in this app, and if you come across some bugs - do report them!

You can read more in the latest announcement post and watch the development post series.

Translations Category Growth

The DaVinci team is working hard on the Translations category and their latest announcement details their team growth, introducing new members and better team structure as the project continues to expand.

For more information on their current structure, you can check this post.

Utopian.io on The Crypto Renaissance Exhibition Website

The Crypto Renaissance exhibition will be held next week in New York and the team from @sndbox are hard at work publishing the updates regarding the event. One of the latest additions to this whole event is a newly created web page dedicated to the event and all selected projects on Steem blockchain.

In the past weeks, we could see that they worked on informative posters with the basic information about each project. They also run the fundraising campaign to fund the exhibition.

You can read more in their announcement and visit the website at https://cryptorenaissance.io/.

First Time Contributing in Utopian.io?

Learn how to contribute on our website

Utopian Witness

Vote for our witness!

This page is synchronized from the post: Utopian Weekly - [July 13th 2018] - Funding Our Meetup, Growing Translations, Welcoming New VIPOs and more

The Weekly Top of Utopian showcases Staff Picks from contributions made in the past week, hand-selected by our Community Managers from across all Utopian.io categories.

This week, we have some fascinating analysis of the potential impact of HF20 on curation rewards on Steem, a fantastic tutorial on the steemr library, a sneaky bug in busy.org and more. As always, we’re grateful to our wonderful contributors and welcome you to take inspiration in their stellar work.

Staff Picks

Analysis by author SP on impact of proposed changes to curation reward under HF20 by @carlgnash [analysis]

An original and very well written analysis based on the proposed adjustments to curation rewards in HardFork 20. The analysis concludes that voting behaviour will change due to the dis-incentivising of the 0 minute self-vote, and that the smaller accounts will be the biggest winners from the proposed changes.

Total payout: 218.31 STU Number of votes: 116

[Tutorial for steemr] Retrieving and Analyzing the delegation Data by @dapeng [tutorials]

A well-written and interesting tutorial about visualizing delegation data using the steemr library. The author makes different uses and plots various approaches related to delegation data. This could definitely help any user to better understand delegation info and history through visual representation of the data.

Total payout: 79.78 STU Number of votes: 124

[KnackSteem API] - More security and features by @jaysermendez [development]

Another high quality contribution by @jaysermendez who has been working tirelessly for the past few weeks on KnackSteem (a project by our very own @knowledges). In this contribution he added some security features to the project, which is always great to see!

Total payout: 203.17 STU Number of votes: 141

Inclusion of Format/style of resume and option to select background, Direct Upload to social media channels, Upload and take picture, Magnifier tool and Font size as well as Interview recorder on Resume Builder by @tykee [ideas]

In this contibution, @tykee suggested some major enhancements to the Resume Builder application. He described 5 very interesting ideas which, if implemented, will give the end user more advanced options for creating a resume.

Total payout: 56.63 STU Number of votes: 15

Logo proposal to Anole Chrome Extension [Task Request] by @ggabogarcia [graphics]

The solver of a logo task request, this contribution by @ggabogarcia showcases a compact symbol design using circles. He invested a lot of time in providing different variations, colors, typography and construction. Its very nice to see users starting from pen and pencil before moving onto digitizing the idea. That is the way great logos are made.

Total payout: 136.56 STU Number of votes: 157

Building Node Chart with using Vue.js D3-Network and Materialize CSS by @sargoon [video-tutorials]

A very thorough tutorial from @sargoon that iswell organized and backed up with very good text and images to assist learners. @sargoon has been around the community for quite a while now and we look forward to many excellent video tutorials from him.

Total payout: 128.28 STU Number of votes: 32

busy.org 2.5.0 - Effective SP not shown doing a Power Down by @josephace135 [bug-hunting]

@josephace135 found that during a Power Down, instead of effective SP, total SP was shown as Your Balance in busy.org. He reported this to the busy.org team, and they were quick to solve it and add it to their completed milestones.

Total payout: 23.48 STU Number of votes: 20

[Documentation] Explanation on Add to Homescreen on FreeCodeCamp Repository by @superoo7 [documentation]

This is a great contribution received in one of the biggest open source organisations FreeCodeCamp (FCC). It took 7 months to get a PR merged but it’s certainly a gem among the contributions.

Total payout: 112.69 STU Number of votes: 235

Utopian.io Post Statistics

The staff picked contributions are only a small (but exceptional) example of the mass of contributions reviewed and rewarded by Utopian.io.

• Overall, the last week saw a total of 203 posts, with 136 of them rewarded through an upvote by @utopian-io.
• In total, Utopian.io distributed an approximate of 8679.89 STU to contributors.
• The highest payout seen on any Utopian.io contribution this week was 308.859 STU, with a total of 989 votes received from the community.
• The contribution that attracted the most engagement was DBlog.io - Decentralized Blogging Platform - Backend improvement, with no less than 21 comments in its comment threads.
• The average vote given by Utopian.io was worth 63.82 STU.

Category Statistics

|Category|Reviewed|Rewarded|Total rewards|Top contributor| |:-|:-|:-|-:|:-| |documentation|4|2|114.11 STU|@feekayo| |bug-hunting|22|13|176.58 STU|@mightypanda| |translations|29|26|1732.08 STU|@susanli3769| |development|49|33|3146.64 STU|@dapeng| |analysis|6|6|378.30 STU|@superoo7| |graphics|46|30|1917.56 STU|@dee-y| |video-tutorials|4|2|139.17 STU|@sargoon| |tutorials|22|13|914.90 STU|@steempytutorials| |ideas|13|8|112.39 STU|@melaffection| |blog|5|2|33.90 STU|@mactro|

First Time Contributing in Utopian.io?

Learn how to contribute on our website

Utopian Witness

Vote for our witness!

This page is synchronized from the post: Weekly Top of Utopian.io: July 5 - 11

The pinkest creature on the blockchain, @techslut is our Chief Marketing Officer, lives and breathes Utopian.io and defines herself as a geeky pink polyamorous polyglot and social justice rogue. Meet the pink lady that seems to be everywhere.

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

Who are you, @techslut?

I am a content writer in Israel with pink hair and too many years of experience as a technology journalist, marketer, advertiser and copywriter. When I am not plotting the future of open source economy with Utopian.io as a world-known brand, I watch science fiction shows, read technology related news, and spend time with my significant others. Yes, others. There is more than one. I live an open source kind of life.

In the past I practiced martial arts including Muai Thai and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, cooked delicious dishes and liked long walks. This all took a back seat when I became ill with fibromyalgia, an unpleasant chronic pain condition that forces me to work from home (rather than an office) and causes me to be sleepy and grumpy half the time. People say the other half is worth tolerating the sleepy and grumpy me.

Writing is my life. I’ve always written and will continue to write as long as I can put letters on paper / screen. I’ve worked as a technology journalist, blogged from the age of dial-up internet, and even had a few poems of mine published locally. Being as pink and as active I am on social media, I am considered a very minor local Facebook celebrity in some circles.

Drawing by @jillustrations

What brought you to the Steem blockchain, and how did that path lead to Utopian.io?

In late 2016 I visited a friend of mine in Israel (@simba) who very excitedly told me of a blogging platform where he made money just posting photographs. I was intrigued. I joined, made a few posts and some STEEM, but life got in the way and I abandoned my steemit blog, promising myself I would return to monetize the writing process of my novel.

When cryptocurrency became “hot” again in 2017, I returned to Steemit, as I said I would, and began to publish my novel with the help of the kind editors on @theisleofwrite. Payouts were nice, and I was getting involved with initiatives (and getting in trouble with some bernies) when I saw a post by @elear about an inspiring new initiative on the blockchain aimed at rewarding voluntary contributions to open source projects. My reaction? I delegated half of my then SP to @utopian-io.

Pretty soon, Utopian.io didn’t quite need my little delegation as it became one of the most successful initiatives to pop up on Steem with a truly revolutionary vision. So I looked for other ways to help and found myself bugging @elear daily and calling myself his human Siri in an attempt to try and get involved. It eventually worked.

What is your role in Utopian.io and what do you actually do?

I wear two hats in Utopian - that of the Visibility category manager and that of the chief marketer. While I postpone my investment in my category until Utopian can once again offer a more “marketer friendly” interface, I focus on community activities, PR and marketing efforts to make Utopian.io a familiar name on the lips of the global open source community.

Among others, I write, edit or proof the majority of the content published on Utopian.io Steemit blogs (@utopian.edu and @utopian-io), report the news (and make things funny) on the Utopian.io Open Source Radio Show on MSP Waves, and chat to many project owners looking for advice and consultation on how to best draw contributors and users to their projects.

Drawing by @beekart

What other steem communities / initiatives are you part of?

I tend to make connections wherever I go, so I have friends at @buildteam, I founded the Israeli Steemit community, contributed some to various initiatives here and there, and I try to help out wherever I can whenever I have the time. I believe this blockchain is home to many amazing people and communities, and it has the potential to host many more. Whatever I can do to promote that - I do.

Being a marketer and author, how do you feel you contribute to Utopian.io and open source?

Open source needs more marketers. If you look around the FOSS ecosystem, it is full of developers and technologists, while marketers and content creators shy away from this often elitist group. I do not shy away. It’s not my style. And the ecosystem needs me.

In a blog series I started writing (and promise to continue), I discussed the importance of content and marketing for open source projects. In short: you can’t get collaborators or users for your project if you don’t go out and tell people it exists.

My years of experience marketing mobile apps and promoting content for major brands and companies in the technological industries have given me a unique insight into the relationship between technology, people and money. I hope this knowledge and experience can be of use to Utopian.io and to projects on Utopian.io as well.

How do you see the future of Utopian? What would you want it to be, and where would you like to see yourself in it?

From the very first moment, I knew Utopian.io had the potential to be a stellar success. It’s why I quit my other jobs and decided to focus on it 100%. The future I see is bright. I believe Utopian.io will continue to grow at an exponential rate now that the teams and workflows are better organized that before. I am really looking forward to seeing the new frontend in action and reading the feedback from the users of the beta.

I hope to continue in my role as CMO in Utopian.io for a long time. I hope to someday onboard grandchildren to the platform, if I have any. I also hope to see my team of content creators and public relations managers grow, and perhaps include something resembling a “sales” team in the future as well.

Photo by @ingaaa

What is your favorite thing about Utopian?

Undoubtedly the people. May of this year was a trying month for Utopian.io as an organization. We lost everything but the people, really. What we had at the end of the day were the faith of our investors, the skills of our team and the sheer persistence of our mutual vision. We persevered and didn’t miss a beat, coming out even stronger and wiser from the disaster that struck at our Utopia. I believe that it is those “make or break” moments that define an organization and can indicate its potential for success. Utopian.io passed that test with flying colors thanks to the amazing people on the team.

Utopian Witness

Vote for our witness!

This page is synchronized from the post: # People of Utopian #7 - @techslut