About two months ago, I decided to hit the Meetup.org site to check out Steemit Meetups in my city (Denver, CO). I was encouraged to discover a meetup formed in September 2016 with 26 members, so I jumped in to join to become part of a STEEM ecosystem in my city. After joining, I noticed no Meetups had been planned or occurred since inception. I messaged the group leader assured me there would be something coming up in the very near future. Two months later still nothing planned and no follow up communication.
In many ways, my experience with the Steemit Meetup mirrors and encapsulates a greater disconnect the larger community is experiencing with Steemit.
STEEMFest provided the first real meetup, which created an incredibly powerful sense of community within Steemit, and for weeks after, I believe Steemit benefited tremendously from this feeling of community. Unfortunately, no attempt at follow-up happened and the social capital generated withered on the vine. The Steemit community has since become only a loose, virtual confederation of half-hearted content generators rather than a physical community of dedicated writers and blockchain programmers working together to realize their mutual dreams on an innovative platform.
From the Virtual to the Corporeal
My feeling is that a virtual confederation will never create a connected community and I'd like to take the first steps to help build that community in my backyard.
I’d like to invite writers and programmers in the Rocky Mountain Region to help form a different kind of regular Meetup. The concept would be to create an informal STEEM/Steemit incubator/accelerator for authors and programmers in the Rocky Mountain region.
I envision the incubator/accelerator to have a regular writers circle, and a regular STEEM blockchain programmers circle twice per month. Once per month the Meetup would have a featured authors and content segment to showcase authors and content to the Rocky Mountain Meetup. The community could vote to support (either with the virtual communities feature coming to Steemit, with votes + pooled STEEM awards from the community, etc.) these authors and content generators.
An informal Buttonwood exchange would exist at each regular Meetup to trade STEEM and STEEM Based Dollars (SBDs).
Steemit Writers Circle
Twice per month, I would like to have a Steemit Writers Circle. Currently, Meetup.org has 49 different writing Meetups within 25 miles of Denver, with membership as low as 13 to as high as 2,513. I think this presents an excellent opportunity to expose this local writer base to Steemit and provides a potential opportunity to recruit quality writers into the Steemit ecosystem.
Initially, the focus would be to bring in some local experts mostly focused on content marketing and SEO optimization strategies, possibly for paid speaking engagements. If we are all serious about raising awareness of Steemit to a larger community of writers and establishing a sense of legitimacy and authority to writers as a whole, I think it starts with appearing more frequently in Google searches and back-linked by other bloggers. The intent would be to bring in these experts for our community of writers initially. After the initial phase, I see a larger outreach to invite other established writers in the writing community as a whole and not engaged with Steemit to these writers circle engagements. Ideally, it will expose them to Steemit, prompt curiosity and engage with our community.
It would give us the opportunity to create the first accelerator/incubator for authors (that I know of).
STEEM Blockchain Developers Circle
Twice per month, I would also like to have a regular STEEM blockchain developer circle to run either on different weeks of the writer's circle or concurrently with the writer's circle. Ideally, I'd love to have developers fluent with building applications on the STEEM blockchain present and teach others from the absolute most essential elements to some of the more complex.
Echoing the sentiments of the community, I have always felt the unrealized value of STEEM exists within distributed applications. Many who find themselves in a position where they have an idea, but need help to understand how to build applications on the blockchain.
Buttonwood Exchange and STEEM Driven Marketplace
In addition to the bi-weekly writer and developer circles, and the monthly featured author's segment, this Meetup will also act as an ongoing, informal, weekly buttonwood exchange for STEEM and STEEM Based Dollars, much in the same vein as the some of the Buttonwood exchanges of Bitcoin and Localbitcoins. Ideally, I'd love to see goods and services traded for STEEM at the local Meetups as time goes on.
A Community of Flesh and Blood Rather than Bits and Bytes
I’d like to ask everyone in the Rocky Mountain region to help me form this community. Each of us had a vision or dream of what we’d like to accomplish, or what we felt STEEM/Steemit could become. A community which exists beyond the virtual world, meets regularly and leverages the unique talents of its membership can help propel it forward.
When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you're life is just to live your life inside the world.
Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.
That's a very limited life.
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.
- Steve Jobs