Utopian Weekly - [July 6th 2018] - Our First Meetup, Tips, Translations, Giveaways and more

It has been an exciting week at Utopian.io! While development of Utopian v2.0 is still ongoing, we are optimizing and refining workflows, internal documents and processes as well as organizing community events, giveaways and more.

In this update:

  • New public guidelines for tips
  • New policy for account suspension
  • Utopian trail script upgrades
  • Utopian meetup announcement
  • First giveaways in Utopian.io Open Source Radio Show on MSP Waves

Utopian.io Comment Tipping Guidelines

Insightful and detailed comments are an integral part of the success of any online community. At Utopian, we wish to encourage our community to invest time in detailed, insightful and helpful comments on contributions submitted to Utopian. The category Community Managers are tasked with the duty of finding and rewarding such comments through tips. In an aim to increase the number of comments tipped, we’ve created a guide explaining how you can increase your chances of earning a comment tip. This document includes, in addition to tips, a number of examples of previously tipped comments.

For now, this document is available in a GitHub repository, but will be included in the documentation on the future frontend of Utopian v2.0.

Account Suspension Policy

When policies are violated and users are harmful for the community, their accounts can and should be suspended. To ensure everyone is treated equally in cases where an account suspension is necessary, we’ve worked out a set of policies to serve you and the Utopian team in understanding and managing the process.

Unfortunately, Utopian has faced numerous cases of contributors not respecting moderators’ decisions, and using illegitimate ways to bypass account suspension. This issue is one of those addressed. It is important to note that we have always taken the issue of abuse attempts very seriously. Though it is our hope that situations where these guidelines will be used are very few, it is still important for us to have these policies in place.

The document can be found in a dedicated GitHub repository.

Second Round of Applications to the Translations Category

Watching the Translations category flourish under the management of the DaVinci team is simply astonishing. This week, from July 1st to July 5th, the second round of applications for translators and new language moderators was run. Promising candidates were discovered for Polish, Slovenian, Dutch and Arabic, as well as new translators for the existing groups were found, so the translation team will soon grow to cover even more of the languages spoken worldwide, and moderators to join enhancing selected projects with their work.

You can expect an announcement from the DaVinci team very soon on their blog at @davinci.witness.

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Utopian Meetup Announcement

The most exciting news this week is our planned “company retreat” (meetup, mini-hackathon or however you with to call it). Obviously, the Utopian core team want to meet the Utopian moderators, collaborators and community members so we’re not only inviting you, but also hoping to crowdfund the expenses for participating team members. The Utopian meetup will take place in Italy in late September, following the SteemSTEM meetup in Florence.

This is the first opportunity for everyone to meet most of the Utopian team at one place and we hope to meet you all in Italy!

You can find all information in the Utopian meetup announcement.

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Utopian.io Open Source Radio Show Giveaways

As our listener crowd continues to grow, we are happy to announce that the first Utopian sponsored raffle took place during the show this week. Two exciting prizes were awarded to two lucky winners who proposed some… colorful ideas to participate.

The first raffle prize, a Udemy course of his choice, was awarded to our own @knowledges who can now pick how to expand his, well, knowledges. We believe that a new skill is the best gift to give, so we hope to include similar educational giveaways in future raffles too.

The second raffle prize for the show was a Humble Bundle Cybersecurity Software collection and was awarded by our raffle bot to @lemouth who politely declined his prize. This prize will be raffled out again on the show next week, along with other gifts and surprises we’re preparing have for you.

Got ideas for cool giveaways you’d like to see raffled out? Let us know! And don’t forget to tune in for your weekly fix of Open Source content, interviews, news and of course - awesome giveaways on the Utopian.io Open Source Radio Show on MSP Waves on Wednesdays at 6 PM UTC.

Utopian Innovation Trail Optimization

Due to unreliable responses from the Steem nodes, we’ve had some issues with our Innovation Trail. Some of the posts that we believed were upvoted missed their votes due to timeouts from the nodes. Our developer team resolved the issue, and the Utopian trail is up and running again. If you spot any malfunction or issues with the Innovation Trail initiative of Utopian, please get in touch with our team on our Discord channel.

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Meet Utopian.io and SteemStem at VIRGO in Italy in September!

Come meet Utopian.io! We are excited to announce the launch the dates for the first Utopian (mini)Fest, the MINI one!

Following an invitation by the team at @steemstem to join their meetup at VIRGO in Italy, we at Utopian decided this is an opportunity for us all: let’s meet up!

If you’re a Utopian.io Moderator, Community Manager, collaborator or partner, we welcome you to join Utopian.io and SteemStem in scenic Florence, Italy from 19th to 23rd of September!

For more information about the SteemStem meetup @ VIRGO visit this link

utopian-join-us.png

Join Us (and We’ll Help You Fund It)!

Are you an Utopian Community Manager, moderator or collaborator? Join us in Florence from the 19th to 23rd of September 2018.

To reserve your spot on this exclusive meetup and mini-hackathon, please contact @ms10398 or @techslut on the Utopian.io Discord server by Monday, July 9th.

Those who apply and are accepted (remember - the number of spots is limited!) will receive an additional 50 points to their weekly Utopian.io payout so you can fund your flight tickets and expenses necessary to attend. To receive the extra points for a total of 11 weeks (until the event), you will be requested to provide the details of the flight purchased.

In addition, Utopian has reserved a budget of 1500 STEEM to pay for the accommodations, and the location will be selected when the list of attendees is finalized. As VIRGO is located between Florence and Pisa, we are looking into available accommodations in the area that would also allow us to conduct a mini-hackathon with our amazing team all in one place.


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Weekly Top of Utopian.io: June 28 - July 4

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.

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Staff Picks

This week we feature outstanding bug reports, tutorials, and efforts in analysing payout changes in HF20, among others. These are just some of the best contributions our Community Managers spotted on Utopian.io during the week.

SteemPlus [2.17.6] - Multiple instances of following indication being provided to user upon multiple author name clicks by @tobias-g [bug-hunting]

SteemPlus
Credits: @steem-plus

As always, @tobias-g shows his generous knowledge and skills in his posts, serving as an example to other contributors. In this post, he details the discovery of a bug in the project in which he found multiple ajax calls appended to the UI that were getting triggered in the project. He then proposed and included a simple fix and submitted it as a GitHub pull request.

Total payout: 50.15 STU Number of votes: 18

Busy.org Bug: Post with no json_metadata crashes the whole page by @jrawsthorne [bug-hunting]

Busy
Credits: @sndbox CC BY-NC-ND

This bug report by @jrawsthorne details an issue with busy.org: Any post without any json_metadata included will crash the renderer and result in a blank page displayed on busy.org. The report was written to be easily understandable and even proposed an ideal solution for this bug.

Total payout: 49.80 STU Number of votes: 16

Writing an asynchronous STEEM web-app in Python with asyncsteem by @mattockfs [tutorials]

A fantastically written and well-illustrated tutorial showcasing the use of asyncsteem Python Steem library along Twisted framework, and eventually rendering the outcome of an asynchronous networking web-service via VisJS.

Total payout: 32.30 STU Number of votes: 28

Tutorial: Building a web app with React, Redux, and the Steem Javascript API, PART 3 by @nicknyr [tutorials]

@nicknyr is a regular contributor, whose contributions are often staff-picked. This post is another beautifully written tutorial, an installment in his series on utilizing React and Redux with STEEM, how to properly use json-query for simpler interaction with JSON data, and includes an overview of Redux actions and reducers.

Total payout: 97.53 STU Number of votes: 70

Godot Vertex Shader Documentation by @clayjohn [documentation]

@clayjohn is one of the contributors who has shown consistent improvement in his contribution, and this contribution, the result of his hard work, is worthy for a lot of praise.

Total payout: 114.40 STU Number of votes: 92

My Design - Character Logo for Anole: A Chrome Extension by @naufal [graphics]

This contribution by @naufal shows thought and creativity in constructing this symbol. He used only circles and achieved really well balanced and compact shape. The typography chosen, with its rounded letters, fits the symbol perfectly. The presentation in the post shows every step of its creation, and all possible variants in clean and professional manner.

Total payout: 1.28 STU (not voted yet) Number of votes: 30

HF20 Exploratory Data Analysis on Proposed PayOut Changes by @paulag [analysis]

Paula is a frequent contributor, and this exploratory analysis has generated a healthy discussion on how HF 20 will affect payouts in relation to the reverse auction time being reduced. It is one of the most commented on ‘Analysis’ contributions in the past few months.

Total payout: 190.56 STU Number of votes: 99

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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 194 posts, with 143 of them rewarded through an upvote by @utopian-io.
  • In total, Utopian.io distributed an approximate of 8120.74 STU to contributors.
  • The highest payout seen on any Utopian.io contribution this week was 327.674 STU, with a total of 64 votes received from the community.
  • The contribution that attracted the most engagement was HF20 Exploratory Data Analysis on Proposed PayOut Changes, with no less than 64 comments in its comment threads.
  • The average vote given by Utopian.io was worth 56.79 STU.

Category Statistics

|Category|Reviewed|Rewarded|Total rewards|Top contributor| |:-|:-|:-|-:|:-| |development|40|36|3229.71 STU|@techtek| |tutorials|22|12|562.27 STU|@leczy| |translations|22|17|1218.86 STU|@filippocrypto| |bug-hunting|50|37|663.38 STU|@sourovafrin| |copywriting|2|2|102.49 STU|@olayhemy| |blog|8|7|510.87 STU|@irelandscape| |graphics|29|20|1255.27 STU|@tobaloidee| |ideas|8|2|70.19 STU|@zoneboy| |analysis|5|4|342.23 STU|@paulag| |video-tutorials|1|1|5.71 STU|@alexendre-maxim| |documentation|1|1|114.16 STU|@clayjohn|

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Utopian.io Weekly - [June 29th 2018] - Increased Rewards for All, Optimized Voting Formula, Translations is Ready to Grow & More

Never stopping and never slowing down, the Utopian.io team has even more updates for you this week. What have we been up to? Optimizing the reward system, increasing your maximal rewards, working on expanding the translations category and more!

In this update:

  • Increased maximum rewards across all categories
  • New exponential voting formula
  • Focusing on community & team conferences
  • Expanding the Translations category and adding more languages with DaVinci
  • Welcoming new members to the VIPO Club
  • Fresh sneak-peaks at the development of the new Utopian.io frontend
  • Community activities and collaborations

Do Your Best! Announcing Higher Maximal Rewards

As always, our aim is to strive for a continuous rise in the quality of contributions submitted to Utopian.io, and incentivize the community to bring impactful value to the FOSS ecosystem. To encourage you to be the best Utopian you can be, we’ve decided to raise the maximal voting power to be used across all Utopian.io categories.

Increased maximum rewards

|Category|Old max vote|New max vote| |— |— |— | |suggestions|12|20| |development|40|55| |bug-hunting|8|13| |translations|25|35| |graphics|30|40| |analysis|35|45| |visibility|20|30| |documentation|20|30| |tutorials|20|30| |video-tutorials|25|35| |copywriting|20|30| |blog|20|30| |task requests|4|6|

Along with the raise in maximal reward voting percentages, we’ve also optimized the voting formula used by the @utopian-io bot.

New Exponential Voting Formula

For those of you interested in the exponential formula we decided to use to calculate the final vote, we’ll present it here.

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2
EXP_POWER = 2.1
vote = pow(score / 100.0, EXP_POWER - (score / 100.0 * (EXP_POWER - 1.0))) * max_vote

With this algorithm in place, combined with the rise in maximum rewards, we expect to see contributors striving to be their very best, and always aiming for the top.

Weekly Open Conference

Transparency, openness and collaboration are key drivers in the growth of Utopian.io. In the past, we’ve attempted to separate our bi-weekly updates to the community from our weekly team management talks. To try and get everyone at the same place at the same time to get updates and offer insight, we’ve decided to focus on our weekly Utopian.io team conferences, and invite you to join us weekly on Friday at 5PM CET (GMT+2).

As always, we are open to your input, and these weekly conferences are your chance to communicate to the entire management team of Utopian.io at once.

Translations are Expanding!

The Translations category under the management of the DaVinci initiative is a stellar success. With a team of language managers, pre-authorized translators, and under the leadership of the DaVinci team and our own @rosatravels with @jmromero, it’s really no wonder that the category instantly returned to being one of the most active on Utopian.io.

In light of this, Utopian.io and @davinci.witness will start accepting applications for translation teams for a number of additional languages. Be sure to check the blog post on the @davinci.witness blog for instructions on how to join the team.

Utopian v2 Sneak Peeks

Our development team has been hard at work creating Utopian v2 for you. With a rich feature-set and scalable backend, Utopian.io in its next form promises to be an innovative and revolutionary frontend to the Steem blockchain.

Here are a few shots of the UI as we construct what we hope will be the base of the New Open Source Economy.

Note that the project is still in development and the interface may change.

Homepage

The homepage layout has been updated to better fit with the content.

Recent contributions and task requests

You will find the most recent task requests right on the homepage. Of course, it will be easy to list other contributions and task requests.

Connect your Github account with Utopian

Submit your project to Utopian

You will be able to have your own page for a project. It will be as easy as filling a short form with basic information about your project, including visual assets.

Project page

Your page could look like this one. All information at one place will ease the navigation throughout the project contributions and finding a task request for a project will be simple.

New contribution page

In this section you may see a simplified version of what is yet to come. Don’t worry, you will get full-featured editor.

Welcoming SteemApp and Hede.io to the VIPO Club!

Our exclusive list of Very Important Project Owners continues to grow, and this week we’ve added a few particularly inspiring projects.


Credits: SteemApp team

The first project team to join us this week was SteemApp - a mobile app for Steem on Android and iOS. This mobile app has been in development already, but with their interest in Utopian.io, the project owners decided to open their code to the community, and look for contributors who can join the beta testing of the product. You can read more about the project and find out how to contribute in their announcement post.


Credits: Hede team

In addition, we are proud to welcome to Utopian Hede.io, a project that aims to become a repository for dictionary and wiki-type content on the Steem blockchain, based upon personal experience on a particular topic.

The project owner reached out to the Utopian team for consultation on their project announcement, and we are excited to be part of this ambitious initiative on Steem. Additional information can be found in their announcement post.

We hope to see your contributions to these projects across all Utopian.io categories, helping them grow and flourish.

Collaboration with @sndbox

The Steem-based initiative @sndbox is collecting donations for a Steem promotional activity at The Crypto Renaissance exhibition in New York. Among others, this exhibition will include a wall dedicated to Utopian.io, and their latest post included a draft of this display.


Credits: @sndbox CC BY-NC-ND

MSP Waves Utopian.io Open Source Radio Show Wants to Give You More!

The expanded and extended two-hour show with @jedigeiss, @buckydurddle and @techslut is turning into a hit. With the audience growing and more listeners tuning in, we want to give back to you in the form of free giveaways.

What giveaways? That’s up to you! Tell us in the comments what kind of geeky, open-source-themed or educational gifts we can raffle out to our growing audience of avid Open Source radio fans - YOU.

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Weekly Top of Utopian.io: June 21 - 27

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.

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Staff Picks

This week we feature a valuable development update from a Steem dApp, informative tutorials and bug reports, among others. These are just some of the best contributions our Community Managers spotted on Utopian.io during the week.

My Logo proposal to Steemg [Task Request] by @ggabogarcia [graphics]

Excellent quality of both logo and its presentation. Author payed a lot of attention to make additional deliverables such as patter, safe zone, app icon, open and closed version etc. Inclusion of sketches and creation process further enhance the presentation.

Total payout: 72.90 STU Number of votes: 147

Steem Pay Update - Creating the First REAL ECONOMY on Steem Blockchain! by @asbear [development]

SteemPay is an application that aims to simplify the selling and buying process using SBD, with some people in Korea already actively using it in stores! In this update @asbear added support for 8 more currencies and other important features such as the ability to sign up and log in - all in all it provides some great value to the Steem community!

Total payout: 732.91 STU
Number of votes: 953

Tutorial: Building a web app with React, Redux, and the Steem Javascript API, PART 2 by @nicknyr [tutorials]

This is the second staff-picked tutorial by @nicknyr, providing some great insights into utilizing dsteem, a great alternative to steemJS, which the author substitutes now in his tutorial for building React app to communicate with the Steem blockchain.

Total payout: 62.80 STU
Number of votes: 55

Introducing HEDE: Wiki Platform & Knowledge Sharing Dictionary on Steem by @hede-io [blog]

Hede-io is a social networking platform inspired by a dictionary format popular in Turkey which is mostly used for sharing knowledge based on experiences in an informal way, unlike usual dictionaries on the web. The founder developer of the project @ercu published a spectacular introduction post containing every detail of the project including an introduction to the format, development progress, future plans and comparisons with the similar concepts and projects. While opening up the format to the rest of the world, the project has a great potential to create an active community on the Steem blockchain.

Total payout: 138.06 STU
Number of votes: 161

[eSteem Surfer] [Version 1.0.5] - Markdown Renderer Problem by @josephace135 [bug-hunting]

@josephace135 being new to the community, has shown great improvement and his work is superb. Though the severity of this bug is Minor, and despite this being his 2nd post, he made extra effort to make this a great contribution.

Total payout: 41.17 STU
Number of votes: 340

Beem: race condition slowing down multi-threaded blockchain stream by @stmdev [bug-hunting]

A major bug, reported with great insights into the project. The contributor had a productive conversation with the project owner, trying to figure out problem and in the end solved it. This relationship is what Utopian strives to build. The contribution was well-written and every use case was shown in proper snippets, which increases the readability of this bug report.

Total payout: 41.30 STU
Number of votes: 15

The Factors Influencing Steem’s Retention Rate by @algo.coder [analysis]


image source: LiveChatInc.com

A late staff pick for the previous week. In this contribution, @algo.coder looked into some of the quantifiable factors affecting STEEM’s user retention; factors such as used applications, used tags, powered up STEEM, and the amount of payouts. What made this contribution unique was its attempt to uncover user behavior that could help concerned readers decide on the course of action to improve the user retention in the platform.

Total payout: 187.78 STU
Number of votes: 97

Extremely useful information was provided along with proper testing, these are all characteristics of a great bug-hunter. The bug has the potential to affect a majority of posts. Hopefully it is fixed by the dev’s in under one day. I expect more good work from @sourovafrin.

Total payout: 10.49 STU
Number of votes: 28

Mix Rust Code (WebAssembly) with Vue Component #optimization - analyze wasm call graph and shrink the size by @drsensor [tutorials]

Another remarkable tutorial by @drsensor about mixing Vue with Rust code, analyzing WebAssembly code, and minimizing wasm file size. Great illustrations, detailed, well-planned, and top of the line tutorial.

Total payout: 62.92 STU
Number of votes: 178

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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 229 posts, with 167 of them rewarded through an upvote by @utopian-io.
  • In total, Utopian.io distributed an approximate of 8103.71 STU to contributors.
  • The highest payout seen on any Utopian.io contribution this week was 732.91 STU, with a total of 953 votes received from the community.
  • The contribution that attracted the most engagement was Steem Pay Update - Creating the First REAL ECONOMY on Steem Blockchain!, with no less than 253 comments in its comment threads.
  • The average vote given by Utopian.io was worth 48.53 STU.

Category Statistics

|Category|Reviewed|Rewarded|Total rewards|Top contributor| |:-|:-|:-|-:|:-| |graphics|76|56|2933.59 STU|@tobaloidee| |translations|21|19|953.27 STU|@susanli3769| |documentation|2|2|51.48 STU|@stmdev| |ideas|11|5|56.17 STU|@sourovafrin| |development|44|36|2577.25 STU|@kit.andres| |bug-hunting|41|26|472.67 STU|@mightypanda| |analysis|5|5|285.39 STU|@petermail| |tutorials|15|9|382.31 STU|@pckurdu| |video-tutorials|1|1|68.69 STU|@buckydurddle| |blog|6|5|308.84 STU|@hede-io|

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People of Utopian #6 - @espoem

One of the most prominent Utopians, recently promoted to an executive position in the company, @espoem is a serious, determined and organized 24-year-old in the Czech Republic. Though he dubs himself “unlikable”, those who work with him know him as helpful, professional and (almost secretly) fun.

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

Who are you, @espoem?

I am a 24-year-old man who has been studying in Computer Science field. You may ask “Why he has only so little knowledge about open source?” or “Why is he not engaging in the development process?”. The truth is that even though I have knowledge needed in the field, I was not yet able to fully utilize it. I could say that I did not want to slow the development down as it required immediate actions to unexpected events. Still, new technologies and writing code are of my hobbies and interests. Utopian is perfect place to discover so many new projects built with large variety of tools and languages. One does not need to wander around to find something new and interesting as it comes to us in Utopian.

I mentioned it before, I would say that I am more of the observing type that is better to have access to as many information sources as possible. Sometimes, I feel like there’s too much to it but at the same time, leaving anything out of the view would make me feel that I deliberately ignored it. Knowing about the daily routines and what people talk about is part of our work in Utopian.

I am hard to share anything from my “real life”. Although we are not able to avoid not to share personal information in today’s world, I would keep other interesting aspects and periods of the life to myself. It is not that it could not be shared but I would say that it is one of my bad characteristics. It may not look like it but it is difficult for me to do anything that I do not see as profitable to me, and I am not talking about money. Sharing more than necessary is therefore not of my interest here.

Believe me or not, I am not really a likeable person and not many people are willing to stick around. But it is also them who slowly change my attitude and perception of the world.

I don’t have pets as they would want to run away from me. 😃 Nah, really I am bad at taking care of someone else. I have to take care of friend’s plants which for unknown reasons resist to grow. I like music like Damien Rice, Of Monsters and Men, Daughter, and Keaton Henson. I can’t name a genre to pick the music I like and I am ignorant enough to actually remember the lyrics but this kind of music is soothing to me. When I need to stop thinking, I play something from these interprets. I think that for many people it could be depressive, perhaps it is, but for me it is calm. There is something special about these. It is hard to grasp it and properly name it but they are unusual artists.

As for the shows, I like anime movies. They look simple yet they are often thousand times better than any western animated movie. If I were to pick some, Howl’s Moving Castle or Your Name. (Kimi no na wa.) could be good examples. I don’t know why but I admire strong relationships between people and when a person is willing to give up something of theirs for someone else. That’s something that I am far from able to do, or at least I feel that way.

What was the path that led you to Utopian.io?

You could say that it was a coincidence that led me to the Steem blockchain. It was in August last year, when the Internet was full of YouTube demonetizing video content creators. I came across an interview with @heimindanger talking about DTube, at that time not yet an open source project. Checking the site required an account but unlike on other websites, this one required an account on Steemit. I was really curious what that was about, as they claimed that the authors can earn some money for the content.

Not long after I joined, I was given an opportunity to work for the Busy.org team. They were working on the private beta. One of @fabien’s friends was asking for help with some Czech string translations, and I sent him what I thought was best. My response to this simple request opened the doors for me to Busy.org and I knew from the beginning that I liked it more than Steemit, even though they had only few features compared to Steemit at the time. Still, it looked better and was more user friendly. That moment could be the second coincidental event that pulled me into the open source world.

The third coincidence, as I see it, was the moment elear literally took the code of unpublished Busy version 2, and made a new project out of it. The early times of Utopian. At first, I thought that it was bad of him, since he published a project that revealed the work done on another project and kept somewhat secret from users. But after I talked to fabien about that, I understood that it was really alright, and it was the principle of open source code that allowed @elear to use the code published to create something new.

What made you want to get involved?

Although I was familiar with some open source tools, I did not really make my own before, nor was I involved in any open source project. I would say that almost all my experience with open source projects come from the Steem ecosystem and projects that are built on top of it. So before Utopian, my involvement in open source was more that of user, and genuine contributor of translations and bug reports for Busy. This pushed me towards Utopian.

You were, up until recently, the CM of the blog category. How did you find yourself in that position?

Since I’ve gotten involved with Utopian.io, I have been assigned different roles within the moderation team, the latest of which was the role of the Community Manager of the Blog Posts category. Long before that I was one of the first moderators to help keep Utopian in shape. It was not an easy task because the ideas and view of Utopian progress were different. To be honest, I had few moments when I considered leaving. One of the reasons was the degree to which the moderator position was time-consuming and I was not able to efficiently manage it.

But you decided to stay, fortunately for us all. What changed your mind?

I would say that my involvement in Utopian was highly affected by our team, the people who I could work with everyday, their engagement and ideas on how to make Utopian better. To me, Utopian is full of inspiring people, and it is them who have impact on me and my day-to-day decisions. We would not be able to get so far without some of them. Moreover, I can’t forget elear. He is the man who could convince me to endure the tough times and he is the man who came with the brilliant idea of Utopian. I believe that it has been him and his passion for the project over those months that made me want to be a part of Utopian. I did not see a project like that before and I am happy to help this project move forward. It’s become a kind of addiction for me. Still, I am really glad I had not left.

Not only did you stick around, but you continued to climb up the corporate ladder before it was even there. How did that happen?

After working hard as a moderator, I was asked to oversee the team as the first supervisor. Back then, everybody basically worked on all kinds of contributions. The role was very similar to that of a Community Manager, but involved managing a smaller group of people. It was only later, when we needed to recruit more people, that we created “specialized” groups of moderators. A few months later, the role of Community Managers replaced that of Supervisors, as we slowly changed our approaches, and strived to engage the community more throughout the contribution evaluation process.

Since we had so many amazing people in the team who fit their positions, I somehow assumed the blog category would be some kind of leftover. Not in a bad way, of course, but because moderating blog posts does not sound as exciting as working with developers and watching their progress with projects. Luckily for me, I was wrong. I have worked with so many great people, some whom remain in the category moderation team still.

Now you have a new role in the organization. One that was obviously needed. What can you tell us about it?

Utopian has grown into a serious and large project that is backed legally by a registered company. Although everyone in the team has their own role in the whole system, it was not enough. Utopian consists of tens of people who work on different tasks and many of them live far far away and the communication is not always easy. There were so many occasions where a simple task could be left undone simply because the focal point for most activities in the company was only one man - @elear. He was involved in literally everything Utopian, but as we all know, one can’t do everything on their own. So to help remedy this situation, I was offered to step down as a Community Manager and to accept a new position: Operational Manager. In short, my job is ensure everyone in team (moderators, CMs, developers) to do their work it a timely and coordinated fashion.

Sadly, we are still behind on the delivery plan. But as I said, it is now my duty to make sure that the tasks are completed and nothing is blocked. The results may not come immediately but I believe that they will be visible soon. I am not a person who can provide years of experience in such a position but I believe that I will be able to do it as best as I can, and that we will get all things organized and done.

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?

I would like to see Utopian as stable and globally recognized company and initiative, with its aim to support and fund open source projects. While our path to realizing that vision has changed quite significantly in the past half year, the idea remains. Utopian is a place for enthusiasts and professionals working on open source projects, and unlike other platforms, which do have similar roots, Utopian is not focused on developers only, but it is open to many of types of contributions and the list may grow in time.

There are many areas in which Utopian could offer support by utilizing its rewarding system, and there is always room for better definition of the guidelines and processes for reward. Although, further generalization will require more people involved, both in the Utopian team and in the community.

We are in the process of rebuilding the front end, which is an important part of Utopian, and serves to identify and differentiate it from other Steem apps. I believe that when we are able to present it, our users will want to contribute more, as they often told us that they are not satisfied with the current process of contribution submission through alternative blockchain frontends.

From my point of view, I feel I have been more of a supporter and observer who alerted and warned team members if anything went wrong way. With this new position, I suddenly face new responsibilities that will help me decide if I am suitable and capable to lead people efficiently. That position is not that far from leading the organization, right? 😄 Just kidding!

The responsibilities I got are huge, and I am yet to see what the outcome will be. If there is another opportunity to go up, I would take it with gratitude.

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This page is synchronized from the post: People of Utopian #6 - @espoem

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