Sndbox summer camp: first thoughts on project development

I’ve recently teamed up with six other people* to develop a blockchain based newspaper as part of @sndbox’s summer camp quest.

*The wonderfully talented people on the @steem-times team: (including the 'quests they won):

@gabriellecd – Writing Quest, Venezuela
@livinguktaiwan – Travel Quest, Taiwan/UK
@victorcovrig – Photography Quest, Romania
@warpedpoetic – Writing Quest, Nigeria
@superoo – Coding Quest, Australia
@karmachela – Art Quest, Indonesia
and @me of course, but I'm not THAT talented TBH.

The general idea is that we can’t rely on trending to tell us ‘what’s occurring’ on the platform, so we need some other mechanism to give us a reliable source of information about important developments in the steem ecosystem, which is the starting point for @steem-times.

This project is very much in its early stages, and below are just a few initial thoughts towards it… my early take on it if you like, and a call for any suggestions about what you’d want to see in the @steem-times.

*NB - I say daily, it may be daily, twice a week, we’ve yet to decide on that as well as the content and pretty much everything else - all part of the fun of @sndbox

@steem-times: KT’s take on it draft one

Steem is a rapidly evolving, often bewildering transhuman environment, and it’s all too easy to miss out on some of the important and really interesting developments that are produced on the platform each day.

Either we open ourselves up to the bot-ridden wilderness, in which case we risk exposure to witnessing the soul-destroying injustice of the over-rewarded posts of the mediocre self-promoters, or we vigorously ignore the trending pages, unfollow all but a few people (maybe nestle into a cosy upvote circle) and just mute everything outside of our echo chamber.

Given that the former is just shit, I imagine that most of us have been steered towards the later, but I think this ‘echo-chamber coping strategy’ not particularly healthy because:

1. There is simply some very good content out there that’s just not getting seen - and that’s a lose-lose-lose situation (may as well start with the low hanging fruit.)
2. You might just miss out on important blockchain developments that could help you earn more (or halve your earnings) overnight!
3. It’s good for us to occasionally move out of our zones of comfort and consciously cross-pollinate into other areas, keeps us from stagnating (and that line alone deserves a @tribesteemup upvote ;)
4. Existing in an echo chamber makes us no different to Twitter - horrifying I know!

This where IMO @steem-times comes in: it’s an embryonic blockchain based newspaper project that aims to publicise ‘what’s occurring’ here on the steem blockchain:

The structure and content of the paper are still very much open for discussion, as is the publication frequency and how the issue of how content will be selected and rewarded.

As I see it, the most useful thing the @steem-times could cover is issues to do with steem itself which could include:

• Links to an summaries of news from @steemitblog (Steem Inc)
• Summaries of Witness discussions (which take place in discord)
• Summaries of data posts from @arcange and @penguinpablo and others with commentary
• Links to informed commentary on steem issues, with analysis, e.g. to the kind of posts @kevinwong puts out occasionally, more frequently recently.
• Whale movements.
• SMT developments
• dApps developments
• there's probably lots of other stuff I've missed.

Now that’s just ONE (albeit massive) topic which I personally think the @steem-times could cover: the above could just be one post a week highlighting the most recent developments and then on other days we could have other topics: anything really: sport, travel, gossip, competitions on steem, newcomers, crypto…. the question is, what else should be in the @steem-times.

Please do comment, or feel free to tell me my ideas above are hopeless.

P.S. I just invented a new tag.

Oh and thanks to @mountainjewel, I borrowed and adapted yer title and tags for 'form'. I also learnt that it's sndbox not snd-box.