It’s been both an honour and a great learning experience to be part of this small but committed community from it’s inception, and I greatly appreciate what the founders of this initiative and their vision, have done to allow free peoples to follow their hearts and participate in something that will greatly benefit humanity as a whole on this blockchain. An opportunity to create a resource that we can all share and be proud of as a community and the wider blockchain. A resource and index, based on hard hitting facts! There is nothing more powerful than well researched and open sourced journalism that can free us from the chains of the manipulators and spin doctors within the dinosaur media and its special interests.

I do believe that this initiative will benefit greatly, with the rollout of the new steem communities feature that we are now experiencing on this blockchain...and things will only get better as we progress from here! I’m also super excited to see @deepdives return after a hiatus, and can’t wait to continue reading and learning from all the veteran and citizen journalists well into the future. (At least there is a future now lol!)

Now that we have more specific communities on this blockchain, I think it will enable us all to form even closer relationships and a new appreciation for each others efforts and research, and will allows us to index our work in a more organised and cohesive fashion, with open access to all. And what better way, than on a censorship resistant platform such as Steem!

I hope it will also allow us to expand our reach and discover new Steemians who may not have known about this initiative previously, that will now be eager to be part of this amazing opportunity. I’m certain there are some undiscovered talented minds and researchers out there waiting to dip their toe into the water, with a bit of encouragement from us all!

Different angles/ideas and points of reference are always a great way to reach and introduce new people into our community, which is something I believe is very important. I also believe that allowing authors to have more freedom in what topics and research they want to delve into will encourage more participation. That’s just my belief of course, and partly because that’s what I myself would prefer LOL. I’m not sure what others think about that, so hopefully you will get more input there.

As far as trying to get more participation in general, I’ve had the thought that a mentoring style program or collaborative initiative may encourage more Steemians to dip their toe into the water, so to speak. Steemians that may otherwise be slightly reluctant or unsure of where to begin, and a bit of guidance from more experienced researchers would open the door for more co-operative efforts. But that would also be a choice for each individual to decide whether they want to try out something like that. I was actually in discussions about doing that with another contributor, but it never eventuated due to unforseen circumstances in the end.

I will be looking forward to contributing and helping where I can, although that’s a little more difficult at this point for myself, as it takes me 3 times as long to do what I previously did...I will be trying my best though! I at least hope to get around to more posts with both comments and manual curation efforts. It is true that I have somewhat succumbed to auto-voting and the bots (@valued-customer lol), but that is something I had little choice in due to both time constraints and life issues.

Just on the general topic of voting, I think a curation trail may actually be beneficial to this community. I can also see a token being desirable based on the fact that there are already many tribes out there that issue tokens and it has become a popular way of rewarding Steemians for their efforts. But that can be decided upon by everyone as a whole:-)