This is just a quick update, as progress inevitably slows in a software project once it becomes necessary to coordinate the work between multiple project teams (our team + UI teams for the various Steem frontends).
We've been operating the testnet for over a week now, with one reset so far to incorporate some changes. Since our last post, we've been responding to community questions/issues in github and communicating with some of the frontend UI designers. This includes making minor changes in the implementation of the proposal system as a result of these requests (mostly from Michael Vandeberg of Steemit's development team).
One of the most important things that's happened this week is that it's been decided (after some discussion with Steemit) that we would take on the task of adding support for proposal voting to the upcoming Steemit wallet web site, so we've assigned two of our UI designers to this task. We're currently estimating that we will be able to complete this task in about a week, as we'll be working with a "new to us" code base that will have some amount of learning curve associated with it.
After we've completed the above step, the Steem proposal system should basically be complete, so we'll check in with Steemit at that point and see if we can coordinate release of the Steem proposal system with any work they have ready (to reduce the number of updates that node operators must make). From discussions with Steemit, it looks like that the current practice is to release the software with a 30 day delay before hardforking code activates (in order to allow node operators like exchanges plenty of time to update before the hardfork activates).
