Science Communication on Steem - News and Updates from the SteemSTEM Summer

Despite many of the team members having been away this summer, we have had a VERY busy July and August. As such we are especially pleased to update you, our vibrant community, about the status of all on-going SteemSTEM activities and actions during this time.

For the past several months, SteemSTEM has been marching towards its grand goal of building a novel science communication medium running on the Steem blockchain. We all recognize that science communication is a vital force worldwide and we believe Steem has a significant role to play in this space, through SteemSTEM.

Several decisions have been made to assist this in becoming a reality, and here we will describe each in full. Briefly, we are finalizing the development of a stand alone SteemSTEM app, SteemSTEM has now become fully active on other social media platforms and our curation guidelines have been updated in order to more effectively attract science bloggers and research institute press offices to Steem.

Finally, in continuing our trend of holding meetups in crazy (sciency) places, we are looking forward to a successful up-coming meetup at Virgo Labs.

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The SteemSTEM App

In order to increase the visibility of high quality posts in any of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) topics, nothing will allow us to be more effective than a custom-tailored user interface.

The first beta version of our application should be released within about 10-15 days, and on this SteemSTEM platform, only posts supported by SteemSTEM curators along with those of white-listed high quality content creating authors, will be visible. This content selectivity will ensure we are able to present the world with a level of STEM quality in order to effectively attract:

• Any potential investor who sees the value in monitization incentives (Steem) as an aid in effective science communicating.
• Any top-notch science blogger and field expert who would enjoy the unique support of their work that only Steem can provide.
• Any individual interested in learning/reading about fascinating, fact based, cutting edge STEM content.

With such an app at hand, we will be able to start touring research institute press offices from all over the world to bring them to Steem, showing them the varied advantages of using Steem as a tool for spreading news about what their research groups are doing. By making state-of-the-art research communications available on Steem, we will set the precedent of the Steem blockchain as a primary source of scientific information.

We hence aim to offer a space where both STEM professionals and passionate bloggers can freely distribute their knowledge in a social media environment that actively promotes and rewards them. With one long-term goal being to incentivise the direct communication between experts and interested viewers; helping to reduce the number of inaccuracies in reporting of STEM content, generated by journalists' interpretations of data that are so prevalent today.

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SteemSTEM on other social media

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We have recently created SteemSTEM accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, so that we have a way to provide updates about all new trending articles according to our standards and our actions to the outside world (i.e. anything lying outside the Steem ecosystem).

We believe that anything shared on Steem should not stay on Steem. Science communication is vital and information should be spread on a wider level, across the borders of Steem.

By expanding SteemSTEM beyond the frontiers of the Steem blockchain, we provide incentives for STEM experts and bloggers to communicate their work to the mainstream audiences both on a platform that rewards them, and through other mainstream media as a bonus.

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Curation and honor members

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Our curation team decides on the voting strength a post should receive amongst four levels: small (encouragement and motivation), medium (informative post), standard (post that goes beyond providing information about a given topic), high (discussion of state-of-the-art research, or something that cannot be found elsewhere).

Such rules allow us to provide our strongest support to universities, research institutes and STEM professionals on Steem who are the ones providing information that cannot necessarily be found elsewhere. In addition, STEM aficionados also get supported to a good extent when sharing their passion.

We have moreover set up a team of motivated and engaged honor members providing help and guidance for writing interesting and well-referenced STEM posts respecting copyrights. They furthermore motivate each member of the community to engage with each other, handle complaints and questions and help to track scammers and plagiarists.

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Implication on Steem

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As SteemSTEM runs on Steem, it is important to also work to support the Steem blockchain, without which none of our goals would be achievable.

To this aim, we are currently setting up a SteemSTEM witness and planning to deploy an RPC full node.

We will provide more information when we will be ready and when the server setup will be finalized, in the upcoming weeks.

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Meet us in Italy, at Virgo Labs

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To finish this status update post, let us remind that about 30 people will visit Virgo Labs in 3 weeks time. This research institute is one of the few places in the world tracking and detecting gravitational waves.

After having organized our first meetup inside the LHC, we naturally moved to another place important for science: a laboratory connected to the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics. We are looking forward to this meetup, organized with our friends from Utopian.io. News, stories and pictures will be shared with those unfortunately not attending.

If you want to help us with the meetup organization, please do not hesitate to support us through our fundition campaign.