Dear @DtubeDaily on @Dtube #138 // could we empower more balance and diversity in the top witnesses - more training, more women there PLUS my 777 delegation from @nathanmars ;)

we have an incredibly rich amount of technical talent distributed around the steem blockchain but there is one thing that I’ve kinda noticed that we probably should address in the next 6/12 months and that’s diversity in the very core components of the way this blockchain runs and that’s diversity in the upper realms of the witness stakes.

We have some incredible witnesses that have stuck around, maintained their servers and been paid handsomely for it, I mean I did some some figures of the top witnesses getting somewhere in the order of $7k a month, servers are costly and so is around the clock support and activity — trust me, some of us live to wake up and get back on the machine again.

But it struck me that if the gatekeepers are getting squeezed out elsewhere then they are gonna run like rats and look to get in other places, I mean we’ve already had our fair share of megalomaniac witnesses which thankfully have sold up and gone (at least I think so) — the last thing we need is those self serving alphas taking up more slots in the pursuit of vanity and power — it would be nice to feel like our main pillars of the chain have the emotional intelligence to debate that stuff and if the recent live streams are anything to go by we have a really good foundation to build upon! — but it needs more diversity. .. .

. .. and maybe better messaging, visibility, photos, background, stories, maybe I just need to collect together all the witnesses right now and from their link application put something together around that, that could make an interesting series actually…

And let me just say the witnesses that I vote for currently are because of their insane work ethic, beliefs, intelligence and insights, I’ve followed them, met a few at steemfest and found them to be balanced people who I trust with being incredible guided individuals that have steered this ship forward so far — I may need to revisit a few and add some in after the recent hard fork, I think that’s a fair thing to do with each hard fork tbh.

So it’s got me thinking, diversity, how do we train up, learn the in’s and outs. Do we need c++ coders to scour the code, do we have an outreach program to activate more women into the steem blockchain at the highest level?

I mean we already have done wonders with the potential for ethically reporting how sustainable or unsustainable the steem blockchain is with the RC credits rollout — I can’t wait to see a ‘this is how much this chain costs’ websites, like a system wide barometer of the cost to keep this chain up and running, I think it’s valuable to see that information on the daily — everything has a cost.

There is a cost in terms of mis-communications too, clearing down the decks, people who just came in, powered up and got hit by the bug with no previous knowledge that the ship would self right itself in due time, maybe we lost them, never to see them again — I guess that’s what comes with the rapid pace of innovation these days but maybe we can be doing more there to really report for more types of people on the chain.

While maybe probably don’t see the various levels as ‘class’ structure there is certainly going to be a requirement for more messaging, maybe the same messaging but for different audiences — maybe we need to distill and de-techy some of the learnings from the issues so they filter down to the people we need to stick around to keep on adding value into the chain — I think more emotional intelligence and diversity in the witnesses will bring that and I hope that knowledge will trickle down.

So what do you think, could there be an opportunity to get a few of the top witnesses together at steemfest 3 to do an ‘opener’ for people interested in becoming a witness to really dig deeper into the day to day operations and at the same time train up/education people (especially women, because I think a balanced top 20 witnesses would be healthy for our public image as well) so that we can keep that momentum going that was obvious from the witness forum yesterday where at a lot of people attended.