Introduction

What an eventful project it has been! LID (Live and Direct) reporting has made it possible for us to tour the world each day and see things as they happen. We have been able to see city traffic, morning rush hour, markets and malls, kids in a park, and plenty other events as they are happening right there. We have seen amazing support from our voluntary LID reporters who also double as devoted members of SteemAlive community. We are also thrilled to see our reporters wake early each day, waiting for the LID post to make their very first LID report. Overall, LID has been a bundle of success that we did not even foresee when we started it. We are indeed grateful to you all that made this journey a memorable one. Our reporters, the admin, @steemcurator01, and our entire Steemit friends. We say a hearty THANK YOU for your kind support. It has been huge.

As with any human endeavor, LID has not been 100% perfect. We have been calling for ideas to make it better and take it to the next level. SO, now is the time to review how far we have come and see what needs to be done to improve. That is what this post is all about. If you just heard about LID for the first time, click here to read about it in detail.

So, how far have we gone with LID?

LID - the postives

LIke we said in the introduction, LID has turned up a lot of great things and we are happy with them. Here are a few things that really worked in this project:

1.. Engagement: This was the core reason we brought LID into existence and we achieved that comprehensively. Engagement has been a great challenge on Steemit. But LID has helped our reporters to interact with others in a fun and reasonable way. We usually record very high engagement in each LID post. So gradually, our members learnt the importance of reading other peoples LID report and interacting with them. This has also positively affected interactions in members blog posts.

2.. Great Connections: Friendships have been built through LID. Our reporters have come to know each other better and appreciate their unique environments. Many saw others for the very first time through LID - the first reports are usually morning selfies. So through the interactions that follow, great connections where made and relationships built in the process. This has been a positive too.

3. Knowledge on the go: Through LID, we observe events and learn about them as they happen. We have been able to see what a street looks like in Cameroon, city traffic in Nigeria, Sunny afternoon in Indonesia, a fruit market in India,etc. LID exposes us to what daily life in different countries and cities look like. The more we learn about places and things, the more we appreciate our own life and that of others. LID has given us that platform to acquire knowledge.

4. Fun: We have also laughed at some of the LID reports because they are fun. Maybe you have not seen a reporters unedited face when they wake up in the morning, or a child trying to copy an adult, or something just weird happening on the street, etc Sometimes, these things simply make you laugh. SO we have caught fun through LID.

If give the chance to do so, our LID reporters and readers will likely tell you other positive things they enjoy through LID. These 4 above represent just a sample of the positives that we have taken from the LID project.

There are negatives too, which is why we want to do LID in a better way.

LID - the negatives

Everything has not been perfect through LID. Here are somethings that could be improved upon

1.. Content: While we wanted LID to be about fun and interesting things happening around us, it has been more of selfies. Its safe to say that up to 50% of the LID reports end in the selfies that reporters post. Apart from that, some of the reports contain very little description of what is happening in the report images. So we want to see a LID project that goes beyond selfies and one-sentence descriptions. Its great to see other things around our environment.

2.. Reporting Period: We We also observed that while many reporters promise to update us after the morning selfies, few actually do so. The majority - up to 70% - of the LID reports come in the morning. Beyond that, there are usually few or no reports of afternoon or evening activities. We also want to turn this around after now.

3.. Reward: We promised to send 0.5 steem for each days report. We were doing that very well, but at a point, we failed to do that due to funds shortage and other logistics. We will want to get back to how we started and reward reporters to the fullest extent possible.

These are a few negatives and probably more that we hope to address through these changes.

And now.......

Here are the changes to take LID to the next level

Each LID reporter must carefully read and understand these new requirements. Only when they follow it will their reports be counted as valid.

1.. Content: We will still maintain that the first LID report should be a morning selfie. This is a nice way for the reporter to introduce him/herself for the day. The picture should be clear enough and taken at the time of posting the report. For the description under each report, it must not be less than 200 characters. If you use a word counter, 200 characters is not a big paragraph. take a look below:

202 characters

What content could be included in the morning selfie? You could talk about anthingy that happened in the night, what you have done that morning, the weather, and how your day is planned out. Or any other things you wish to talk about.

Subsequent reports

This where we want to see the real LID report. It should not end in selfies. The next reports should be an interesting thing happening around you. The list could be endless. City traffic, nice food you are enjoying, waterfall, a popular mall or market, inside a bus terminal, kids in a park, a nice vacation spot, inside an event center, attending a party or other ceremonies, your pet, heavy rainful, harsh sunshine, inside an airport, a garden, fruits market, taking a walk, etc.

We will not reward a reporter whose reports ended in a morning selfie:

2.. Reporting period: Previously, we allowed you to report at any time of the day, but we noticed that it almost always end in the morning selfie reports. So to improve on that and have a proper structure, we are going to have 3 main periods of reporting - Morning, Afternoon and evening. Out of these 3 periods, each reporter must report at least 2 of them. You choose at least 2. But the best reporters will report in the 3 periods.

Mornining: 5.30am to 11.59am.
Afternnoon: 12noon to 5.59pm
Evening: 6pm - Midnight.

For each period, you are free to make any number of reports depending on your circumstances. But for you to claim the reporting reward for each day, you are expected to report at least twice in any of morning, afternoon or evening periods.

Please note: Due to different time zones, the times stated above should be your local time. However, each post for the day will be published on or before 5.30am Nigerian time.

3.. Engagement: We will also tweek the engagement rule. For each report you make, you MUST reasonably engage with another persons report. We are making it 1-1. It means for any one report, you must reply at least one other person's entry. But please take note: One word or short sentence replies will not qualify as reasonable engagement. We need rich and better engagements.

4.. Reward: We will go back to the 0.5 Steem we send each day for the the valid reports made. Additionally, we will give extra steem rewards to outstanding reports for images, detail, and engagement frequency. We will also try to vote the first 5 or 10 reports for the day. Later in this post, we will talk about a new reward scheme which might look interesting.

New additions to make LID better

We are adding the following to make LID better.

1.. TimeLine of my LID reports: Because the 0.5 Steem we send may not be sufficient reward, we hope you might get votes from our trail or even from any of @steemitblog accounts if you made a LID post. So we are introducing this brand new feature called "Timeline of my LID posts." So at the end of the day, after your very last report, make a post and publish it to Steemalive community. The title should be: "Timeline of my LID posts for today [Day and date]." Then copy all your LID reports with pictures and to the post. You can include a brief introduction and conclusion. However, there are rules.

LID Post Rules

(i.) You can only do this timeline post provided you made at least 5 reports in the day. We will not allow less than that so as to maintain the quality of the post and the LID project itself.

(ii): Your first tag must be lidtimeline

(iii): Include this in your post conclusion:

Thia is a timeline of my LID reports for today. Thank you for reading my reports, I hope you enjoyed it. I am a volunteer reporter for the LID project and am not alone. Would you like to see the reports of other volunteers, check the original LID post.

Then original LID post should be linked back to the LID post for that day.

At the end of the week we will do a weekly LID summary post and feature the best Timeline posts from the week. We will likely set the best entries as beneficiaries of the post to encourage them more

2.. Picture Location: @steemitblog has emphasized the need to add locations to any original pictures used in your posts. This will make it authentic and they promised extra votes for that. Here is there direct suggestion on that:

One thing that you might want to encourage your members to do to help get more vote rewards is to start using What3Words for adding location codes to photographs.

https://what3words.com/
They have an app for both Android and iOS...

https://what3words.com/products/what3words-app/
@rishabh99946 has made a good post about how to use this...

https://steemit.com/hive-196725/@rishabh99946/what-s-is-what3words-how-to-use-or-all-you-need-to-know-or-the-diary-game-useful-tips

So we are not making it a rule, but if you could use the What3words app to get the codes of any pictures you are using for your LID entries, that would be so lovely. Especially for the LID timeline posts, and any posts you make like diaries, you could get extra votes as promised by @steemcurator01 if you put picture location.

If you do this in your LID reports, that would be a valuable improvement to what we are already doing. we trust that you will do that.

Conclusion

Just as when started LID, we didnt actually know how things would turn out, but they turned out great. We hope that these changes and improvements will make LID great and we continue to enjoy this amazing project everyday.

Once again, We are also massively grateful to our community members and others that have given us assistance in many ways such as @shortsegments, @steemcurator01, @stephenkendal. Together, we hope to achieve our wildest dreams and take Steem to the moon!

Learn about SteemAlive and its Projects

Read about some of our other projects

• SteemAlive City Coordinators
• LID
• SteemAlive Greeters
• SteemALive Members
• [SteemAlive PLUS1kSP Club(Details coming soon)]
• About SteemAlive

Written by: @focusnow
For: @steemalive

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