A Chat with Steemit.City Team
SteemMag:
What inspired you to start steemit.city?
Steemit.city:
Menta: The idea of steemit city started with the steemit meetup I organized here in Cambodia in September.
Faddat and rampant came from Hanoi to attend the meetup and started talking about this crazy idea of creating a crypto-driven community here. So for the next 4 hours, we only talked about the possibilities of starting this ambitious project and that's basically how it was born.
We start from the belief that if you put smart, friendly people together, good things happen. SteemIt is doing exactly that in a virtual way. We want to take it a step further and put people together physically: to live and work in a cooperative community that embraces digital money.
Faddat: So basically for me, it's because I need it. What is it? An environment to prosper and grow that isn't constrained by "normalcy". Also a few people have mentioned to me that this seems like an intellectual descendant of an earlier project of mine, metadev. They're right, too.
RubelliteFae: It hasn't been 3 weeks since I started posting on SteemIt, but I immediately saw its potential. I came across the SteemIt.City posts and was instantly hooked.
I have been involved in a couple urban intentional community initiatives in my local area. Each failure was a valuable learning experience. A trend I noticed was that many, many people wanted to live in these kind of communities, but very few have the dedication to actually build them from the ground up.
Then 
Their Mission of helping people follow their passions by eliminating external pressures—i.e., wage labor for mere subsistence—in an egalitarian way is exactly the vision I have had for human progress. I excitedly joined the project in an official capacity on October 3.
SM:
How has been the response of Steemians and non-steemians so far?
Steemit.city:
Menta: The reactions so far have been largely positive. There is definitely an interest from the community, although the opinions on what it should be and how it should be governed vary. This will be one of the more complex difficulties the project faces, how to get consensus on decisions that need to be made.
Faddat: People are interested. It's an unusual idea, and takes a minute to get used to, I think. I just want to say that a lot of the reason for my “having this thought” at all stems from my experiences in Shenzhen. I had to leave that city because of the internet access in China. Anyway, people's reactions— well, I'm hoping to gather more of them really!
RubelliteFae: I have seen a lot of positive, enthusiastic support tempered by some healthy skepticism here on SteemIt. The few people in meatspace with whom I've talked to about the project are less confident in our ability to succeed. I think this is largely due to a lack of understanding in the fundamentals of currencies and an understandable fear of pioneering.
SM:
Further expansion plans?
Steemit.city:
Menta: Our project consists of a few distinct phases. In the first phase we want to get a core group of around 10 people together to work on crypto related projects. The goal is to have a complete team here, from developers and sysadmins to graphical artists and marketers. That way we can complete projects completely in-house, with a minimum of outsourcing. These could then in turn pave the way to make our end goal a reality. Which is creating an entire self-sustaining community where everyone is welcome.
RubelliteFae: Our guys in SE Asia are securing the initial facility this month. There are a lot of really cheap properties and they are working hard to find the right one for our needs. This is made more difficult by the uknowns of startups, like how many people want to join and when. If we start with about 10 people, a villa or small guesthouse could comfortably and affordably accommodate everyone. However, most properties have minimum leasing terms, so we need to make sure we get a place that can handle additional members within the leasing period. This is why we are looking to get as much input as possible from the SteemIt community.
Our long-term Vision is to build a scalable, homeostatic society comprised of businesses, co-ops, organizations, and individuals who share our Values and for the members of this society to impact positive change through research & innovation, education & mentorship, and by living out these ideals.
Basically this means, we are starting with a housing co-op incubator, but over the long term plan to have an entire village which is self-sustaining, collaborative, and economically independent with a wholly distributed authority structure.
Faddat: A city. I like how 
A Chat with 
SteemMag:
So how did you get the idea for the linkback bot?
Well, linkback bot is a product of my search for a Steem project that would generate value for the community and serve as a promotion tool for my other projects. In some way linkback bot is a real world test of the permissionless property of Steem blockchain ecosystem.
SM:
Your other projects? And based on the success of the linkback bot, are you planning on building more bots that perform other useful functions?
I don't think that there will be a moment where a linkback bot can be declared a success, really. At one point it'll be rendered obsolete by a Steem client feature or an app. I'm currently testing a curation rewards management bot and thinking about several scenarios for bots that can be summoned using post mentions.
Not surprisingly, my bot building plans depend on the Steem ecosystem incentive structure.
This Week On Steemit
A lot of interesting events happened this week. And in case you missed them, we’ve got your back. Here are some of the most important events that happened on Steemit this week. ~ Steem maintains last week’s position on the coinmarketcap.com’s crypto market capitalization list as 9th.
For a comprehensive list of dedicated Steem apps. check out SteemTools.com
Meanwhile, SBD maintains last week’s rates ranging from 1 SD = 0.94 -0.95 this week
~$0.26 and $0.27 were the lowest and highest value traded this week for a unit of Steem respectively.
Steemfest Tickets Giveaway Winners #3
Last week, I announced the third and perhaps final Steemfest tickets giveaway. I’m happy to announce 
20 days to go
Are you going?
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