Nine days ago, I published an article titled Female Orgasm - starring evolution (genre - mystery). I mentioned at the end of the article that article is result of a weird experimental idea, science and society initiative. The central motto of the initiative is to promote scientific temper in society. The secondary goals was to promote steemit and majorly science on steemint - for now, within my social circle in mainstream social media.
Summary
In a nutshell, the idea was to engage the common(non-steemian public) in quality scientific discussion. Pay the quality contributors, a part of rewards I earn by making a blog on same topic. Looks like it worked well. However we all donated the reward generated in chief minister's fund to help the victims of flood in Kerala.
Certificate of the kind decision of The Progressive Indians group members to use this money for donation
Long Version
The reason, I thought that steemit would be perfect platform to promote scientific temper in society is, because motivation for reward can make people think and contribute. So hypothetically, if you ask people to discuss a scientific topic, irrespective of their background and reward them for unique and informative contribution, many of them would read, analyse and contribute.
So for my first attempt, I picked a topic most people would love to discuss. Then asked people in one my Facebook group "The progressive Indians" to discuss - what is the purpose of female orgasm. The idea was to pick the best contributors and frame a blog based on the inputs of discussion. I would then distribute within these contributors, the steem, the post post I write would earn(but not SP, so 50%), in fiat(because they are not on steemit yet). So after one week of discussion, I picked 6 contributors who provided unique and valuable replies in the discussion. After, doing a literature survey of the topic and analysing their answers with respect to available studies, I sat down and wrote an article.
The total amount after 7 days on the blog was, $ 27.97. Out of which $20.62 was author payout. So I took out withdrew steem worth $10 to pay them.
These are the best people I know
However, when I asked the contributors for their preferred mode of payment, we came to a rather sweet conclusion. We decided, we should donate the money to victims of the flood in Kerala. This was really kind and thoughtful of the group. So, I instantly donated $10(INR 700) to Chief Minister's disaster fund in the name of our Facebook group The Progressive Indians.
This is the report of first experiment for science and society initiative of steemit. I will look forward to feedback from other members(would also love to hear from other science writers on the platform), regarding this initiative. Hope, the future experiments in this initiative will be equally useful for something. I will use the tag #scienceandsociety, for any posts related to this.
I would like thank everyone who voted on that post to make this tiny attempt useful. Maybe not for us, but someone needy right now, will get accessories and meal because of the those votes. Special thanks to and its members and
for their generous vote on that post.