Sunday Rambles - 31st May

It's the end of the month plus a Sunday, I figured I'd do a bit more rambling. Before, I start, I want to share something that I'm really chuffed about. For those who follow me, you may have seen me post about my Weed Garden. This is my latest seedlings, my 8 days old mangetouts dancing. I filmed a time-lapse video for nine and half hours yesterday taking an image every 2 minutes. When I watched the video for the first time I squealed and kept on re-playing it. Stupid, I know, but that's what lockdown does to people I guess.

Talking of my followers and people reading my posts, I don't really expect many people to read my posts that often, especially when I'm just rambling away talking nonesense to myself. So last week, I was quite surprised when I got quite a few comments to my Sunday Ramble post. If you don't' know what I rambled about, and there's no reason for most of you to do, here's a quick recap

What can I do on Hive to make it a better place? What can I do to make it less me and more everyone? I'm not looking to make a massive impact, that's beyond my capability. Just little things, things that can make an impact on one, two, three or even a few people every week will be great.

@jrvacation commented and said they were looking forward to read my ideas. Honestly? I wasn't just talking to myself. Ok it was in public, sure, but I hadn't really given any thought about what I was going to do. Now it was out in the public, and someone actually cared about what I thought, I had better put my money where my mouth is. Not that I was not going to, but as usual I was going to procrastinate. Anyway, a couple of days later, @jrvacation tagged me about a Dolphin Assemble set up by @fun2learn. The Dolphin Assemble is like a place for Dolphins to hang out, to provide mutual support. One of the first engagement questions asked in the community was How can Dolphin Assemble Community make a positive impact to the Hive platform in future? That really got me thinking.

My initial thought was to set up some sort of help grow a fish initiative. The idea is to select a handful of minnows and support them for a fortnight to a month through a curation trail. And hopefully during that period these accounts will get better rewards and recognition to enable them to grow.

Then there was a bit more discussion about whether we should just be focusing on rewards, or whether we should look to build some sort of support mechanism for the newbies. The former is the easiest and it makes sense to deal with the easiest first. In fact, a couple of days later, I saw that @joshman has started to support minnows to become a dolphin by setting beneficiary rewards to them. And in the same post, @azircon said he was delegating 5000 HP to minnows on a rotational basis. It's great to know there are others out there supporting the minnows, and I'm sure there are many others I'm not aware of. And that's what I meant in my closing statement last week "In fact, if 50% of the masses became influencers, just imagine how much better we could make Hive." I don't know if we're at the 50% mark yet, maybe, maybe not. If not, I'd like to think were moving towards it.

Anyway, on the topic of support for minnows, I then thought how about some sort of mentorship program. After all, most of us have been through a minnow stage ourselves, have picked up do's and don't on the way, tips on how to be more effective, and built up a network on which we can leverage on. All this would be (I thought) useful for minnows to save them swimming around on their own. The program would be supplemented with a curation trail, as ultimately people need to be rewarded for their effort.

I know there used to be other mentorship programs around, but those I'm aware of were all about "post here to get an upvote, use this tag to get more upvote....." not exactly mentoring in my opinion and that's not what I want to do. An effective program needs a lot of effort to run, and most importantly it needs people who are willing to be mentored to grow in the long run, rather than told how to make a quick buck.

So my options are still open at the moment. I guess I might start with a curation trail first, and select some active and worthwhile minnows for each cohort. But first of all, I need the curation trail to make an impact. My few cents alone aren't going to make much difference to people. Probably time to start doing some networking and talk to people for support.

Damn, why the hell did I start playing Steem Monsters this week?! I resisted all these years! It took up so much of my time and I still have no idea what I'm doing 🤓

Sunday Ramble over ...... it's Monday now, a new week and a new month.