CROWDMIND UPDATE #2: We believe in every community member!

We never thought that we would enjoy writing the regular updates this much. We survived the first two weeks after our project launch, and we feel like we are doing this for months instead of weeks. This is not bad, not at all – the reason for that feeling is very simple and beautiful: we received so much community support, much more then we could imagine.

It is hard to say what impressed us more – our Discord members and their opinion about different crowdsourcing applications, or the comments we are getting on our Steemit blog. We received many questions and some of them really helped us to understand what we need to improve in our communication. So, here are the few short highlights about the things people asked us:

At this moment, the Crowdmind is a Steemit based project. Yes, we know the future is in DApps, but we have clear reasons for this. The idea about the whole concept is based on years of research, mostly within @hidden84 Ph.D. thesis which is related to community participation in Urban planning processes. We talked for a months before initial launch, and agreed in one simple fact – the crowd gathered around Steemit as a most popular platform on Steem don't use its full potential. Today, we have many different platforms here, which are great tools but they lack the user base. This is understandable if you look global statistics, and the current situation with bitcoin and other crypto prices don't really help much. But the money is not the only satisfaction. We have brilliant projects on Steemit which harvest the Wisdom of the crowds without direct payment for user contribution (we will present some of them in our interviews – so stay tuned). So we want to help in the creation of an environment which would trigger the full potential of the crowd. This would be accomplished through close work with projects, users, and other groups and individuals who recognize the potential of four types of crowdsourcing activities: crowd wisdom, crowd creation, crowd voting, and crowdfunding. We know this can be confusing to many of you, so we are kindly asking you to read our whitepaper and ask anything you have in our Discord channel or in the comments section under this post. So, we wanted to prove ourselves that we can make a strong community here before we advanced further and create our own platform in the near future.

We are not crowdfunding project, but we support and vote for good crowdfunding initiatives – because they are crowdsourcing. We are not competing with great projects like @fundition – we want to give them our support. For example, they are an incredible platform which definitely makes the world a better place. We will try to give our votes to every project which deserve it and plays along with our goals. But that is not everything. Our mission is empowering the wisdom of the crowd. There are so many ways for crowd contribution before you launch your crowdfunding project. Many of Kickstarter or IndieGoGo campaigns failed because they had a good idea but no specific clue how to approach their key audiences or markets. Sometimes even the idea which looks good can hide small cracks which can cause failure. But The Wisdom of the crowds, that powerful synergy of unique knowledge of every platform participant can help you shape your project and deliver the better crowdfunding call in front of your audience. That is only one reason why we are here. Strong crowd means strong communities, projects, and And that means strong blockchain and Steem.

If we use the Star Wars analogy – we have thousands of Force-sensitive users here, without any knowledge about the ways the Force could work. Imagine the army of Troopers with lightsabers. Sometimes we joke we have that situation here – powerful tools we often use only to milk rewards. There is a whole world of opportunities we can unlock together.

We could go on and write more, but we afraid it will be too long. There will be plenty of time to explain it in more details, and for today we want to ask you to pay attention to two interesting posts we upvoted. The first one is a crowdsourced call for the Bolyartsi Project support and the second one is debate launched by one of the most important Steemit projects around.

First Additions to the Rewards Gallery - An Update on Bolyartsi Project

This is a true example of connecting the Steemit with the initiatives which could be important for offline communities and attract new users to the platform while contributing to the greater good. And this call is not aimed only on fundraising – they are asking you t give them your opinion and valuable inputs and help them to shape the final picture. No limits – perfect for putting Crowd wisdom at work

Thus, the gallery does exist but ideas about how to make it all look better and more elegant will be highly appreciated.
I (@manoldonchev, the project founder) am aware the site looks barely functional but I am maintaining it at my own expenses at the moment and some meetings with developers are to be scheduled and hosting is also to be paid for next year. It is not the current project's goal to develop the website and it was not included in the funds.

Should it become a goal? Should it be included in the plans for future funding? I will be happy to have your thoughts on this.

SteemSTEM Community Feedback: Proposals and Solutions

SteemStem is planning to do some serious changes and they are asking the Crowd to give their opinion. This is an excellent example of the crowdsourcing approach, so please take a look and join the fun.

Today's weekly update will neither focus on the here and now, nor on recent developments (they are plentiful as for instance the development on steemstem.io continues). We instead look to use this update blog as a call for community input on all project-related issues recently raised on our discord server.
We also present, for the first time, some proposed solutions and directions which we came up with. Whilst nothing of this has been implemented yet, the outcome and reactions to this blog are crucial to helping us in setting priorities and finalizing what we should do.

Thank you for reading this. We are reaching the end of this report and we hope you won't mind if we ask you for the support. At first place, we are inviting you to visit our website, read our whitepaper or join our Discord. Your opinion is important to us! If you like what we do please vote for our witness -

@crowdwitness by clicking on the banner below. It is operated by

@svemirac and he is open to answer any of your questions.

P.S.

Today we started to use the @steempres plugin. It was a natural decision because we have to spread our messages across different channels if we want to gather the right Crowd. In the following days, we will start to publish interviews with Steemians who are active in different projects and communities, so we are really excited about this. Happy crowdsourcing people!