Steem Institute: building the next frontier of the Internet

In this concise introductory report on the Steem Institute, we will look at what could be the unleashed potential of the Steem Blockchain, as well as what this Institute hopes to do. Over the coming days, I will publish more insightful reports on the Institute as we release new projects.

The missing link

Steem could be the frontier of the web 2.0. With Open sourcing, HTML 5, Blockchain, AI and Virtual Reality leading the way, there is still one area missing.

Hosting a website is becoming a lot easier and cheaper thanks to the advancement of technology. However, one area that has yet to see any progress is monetization. In fact, with the abundance of websites and blogs, it's becoming even more harder to generate revenue online due to two main factors:

1. the competition for web traffic
2. the rise in the use of ad blockers

Despite several attempts to innovate the online monetization industry, it has proven difficult to improve with Google, Youtube and Facebook taking the heat for their monetization schemes.

While the world searches for ways to innovate the online user monetization, Steem has proven have a mechanism for monetizing user content. If done right, Steem could help innovate the online monetization model.

The broken link

Steem comes with an inbuilt and already known(voting was mainstream due to Facebook's like) mechanism for monetization.

Initially, the blogging community was excited about Steem. Time passed and now Steem is forgotten among even the media circle. Some are striving for the Brave browser in hope of getting tips from generous readers, others are blocking users with ad blockers while others are appealing to users to disable ad blockers.

Steem is nowhere to be found. Even the news of SMT hasn't caused anyone in the blogging industry to notice. And, the price of Steem; it just can't stop the free fall.

If Steem meets the missing link perfectly, then what has caused it to fail to fill in the gap? Why can't Steem find use outside of Steemit.com, Busy or DTube?

The industry saw some kind of hope in Steem which is why it quickly rose to the third cryptocurrency at inception, yet has now fallen into the top 30 - 40 class.

The problems facing Steem

Some of the easily identifiable issues facing the Steem blockchain include:

• Lack of platforms
• Lack of integration system
• Lack of content discovery
• Too many sentiments
• Limiting content-store perception of Steem

Building the next frontier

Why an Institute?

Typically, Blockchain and crypto-currency communities object to the idea of having an institution as it is seen counter-productive to the anarchist tune associated with Blockchain technology.

However, we also cannot deny the fact that organization in some form is at least required for every successful industry. Participation in the Steem Institute is voluntary, and our business structure is more corporate than cooperative.

What Steem can do: the argument

Steem is usually perceived as a content storage blockchain, more like a headless blockchain powered CMS. This perception means that our primary focus on the usability of Steem has been about how to host content with it.

However, we can do more with the Steem technology than just post content. We can build industries around the others utilities of Steem such as escrow, vote, custom transactions, transfer, account creation and more.

By expanding the use case of Steem, we can tap into previously untapped markets, exposing Steem to new investors, developers, and entrepreneurs. With SMTs, we the use cases for Steem would even be much bigger.

What we hope to do

Our mission is to increase the adoption of Steem by providing solutions to the challenges that face the mass adoption of Steem.

Building with Steem

Vision for Steem

Our vision is one where Steem becomes a capitalist system, where people contribute value and get rewarded for it. The more value we can bring to Steem the more valuable it will become.

A future where developers and entrepreneurs build high-quality useful apps, investors get to delegate or securely invest Steem and get market range returns. An environment where people have so many ways to use and earn Steem, no one will feel that the only way they can earn is by sharing curation rewards.

A future where there are curation communities for most countries, national witnesses, incorporated enterprise built on Steem. Oh, and we have plans for Smart Media Tokens too. We are certainly not missing that.

Projects

The are many projects we will be building this year, too many for the scope of this post. I will only highlight their main categorizations.

1. Services: a set of services to use Steem 
2. Network: national communities that provide witnessing, curation, support and more
3. Community: communities for witnesses, investors, developers, bloggers and more
4. Utilities: free and open source utilities for Steem
5. SMT: we surely have something cooked on this too, right?!
6. Many more

Policy

We are a non-political, non-racial, non-religious and non-prejudice organization. We will neither support, entertain, tolerate or partake in any movement, event, policy or activity that aligns us with any faction of thought, philosophy or movement.

Our sole mission is the champion the cause of Steem, to promote the Steem technology, not the ideas or ideologies. We want to provide a secure prejudice-free environment for people who want to work on the advancement of Steem can make their dreams come true, without the fear of prejudice for their values, life, and also without forcing anyone to conform to any set of doctrines they do not believe in.

Management

We are doing a soft community launch, which means building small community and turn-key run working prototypes of our projects until the launch time is due.

Concerning the project's management, we do not have a standing team but are in the process of building one. We intend to recruit the pros as necessary.

We are open to everyone who is interested in taking up any role at any project. All you have to do is follow the guidelines which would be soon available soon. in the meanwhile, you can join our Discord community and subscribe to our associated blogs and on Peer Query.

Funding

We will be using a combination of goodwill delegation, community support, and the SAFLT instrument to bootstrap finance the Institute' s projects in the early days.

Peer Query is a founding partner of the Institute, will host the Institute's project and also provide support. We look forward to working with investors, particularly Steem power delegators.

Launch

Until now, the Institute has been all but talk. However, given the fact that we will be doing a soft-community launch, this post marks the launch of the Institute. No more talk, it is time to build.

Resources and links

Please note that until incorporation we might be using only the community accounts and sites.

Website
Steem.institute - official
Inst.blog - community

Steem
@institute - official account
@inst - community account

Community
Discord: https://discord.gg/xeSnGc8
Peer Query: https://www.peerquery.com/project/u34DY1Uyt

EDIT

Please see the sequel for more information on our intended activities:
https://steemit.com/peerquery/@dzivenu/dzivenu-steem-institute-101-what-we-are-building-and-what-we-stand-for-jnepcd4em0ujq

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Published on Peer Query - Blockchain-powered p2p collaboration.