It has been a while since the last time we reported about the STEMsocial project. The pandemic has slowed us down quite a bit, and most of what we had planned before it is frozen. However, frozen does not mean forgotten or dead. We have plans...
In this short report, we give some updates about curation (which has been a constant since the early days) and the development of our app (which is currently in a state of cerebral death). Both consist in incontrovertible milestones to reach our grand goal: create an environment where STEM professionals and enthusiasts could be incentivised to take STEM communication in a new direction (i.e. directly to the readers without the need of a third party).
Our idea of growing the community with STEM live events is still there, but is rescheduled for later. More urgent things (our app for example) are in order.
Development of our application
All developments related to our application ended in March 2019, when @lemouth (who was the sole developer) got his agenda completely overwhlelmed by university and research duties (in the middle of a pandemic). Today, we can definitely say that our application is in a very bad state. We however need it to achieve our grand goal...
A solution was found earlier in December. The STEMsocial team is happy to announce that @bambukah, who is a contributor and developer for several Hive projects, agreed to become our lead developer. @lemouth will in addition stay on board to review the code. Two pairs of eyes are always superior to one.
After a short discussion we decided to start all developments related to the STEMsocial app from scratch. Here is our roadmap for Q1 2022.
- Create a testing environment (NodeJS, Docker, NginX in proxy-pass mode, etc.)
- Install and configure the
condenserapplication. - Update the user interface so that it matches the one that had been deployed on the former STEMsocial application.
- Asking and handling feedbacks for future improvements (usage of the app, responsive design, better accessibility, etc.).
- Moving to production version on the
stem.openhive.networkaddress.
We decided not to create any DHF proposal for these developments. We aim to do so once this Q1 2022 work will be done and could be integrated into a longer-term roadmap including curation (the development of dedicated tools; plus see below), live events and plans to get in reach with big institutes and known STEM bloggers.
Curation
Our curators browse many tags to track down original and quality content related to all STEM fields in three languages (English, French and Spanish). Whereas we focus mainly on our STEMsocial community tag, we also check out other tags such as #science, #technology, #engineering, #stem, #stemsocial and many more.
We require that any given post discusses some STEM content, but we are flexible on this definition (for instance, we support history, psychology, economics, architecture, medicine and more).
We have moreover always been highly respectable of intellectual property. As such, we always verify that a post is not fraudulent or dishonest (references, image credits and availability for commercial purposes, plagiarism).
For the rest, the supported content is quite freeform. There is no length requirement and our support relies on originality, style, effort and creativity. As one writes on a social media blockchain, we specifically focus on content that is easily digestible by everyone.
We upvote posts according to four levels.
- 10%: To encourage a new user or to acknowledge effort.
- 30%: Average post that fits the guidelines but does not really discuss anything new or exciting, or that is not written with any personality.
- 65%: Very good posts showing both character in their writing style and bringing some fascinating content to Hive. We feel that this class of posts contains information that could be searched for in the future and should thus belong to the top posts.
- 100%: The best of the best, often written with a unique approach to a topic. This content may be completely original, even groundbreaking, demonstrating one's own research, and it will typically be an easy and even fun read.
In addition, setting @stemsocial as a beneficiary to the post rewards slightly increases the level of support.
The famous last words
Please do not hesitate to use the comment section of this post to ask questions or suggest anything. You can also reach us out on Discord.
If you like what we do, please consider joining our community on HIVE and delegating to or trailing the @stemsocial account (85% of the curation rewards are returned).
We wish all of you a happy new year!