Project background
Utopian.io is the front end portion of Utopian, a Steem blockchain project seeking to reward users for making valuable contributions to open source software projects.
It is a website built with the React JavaScript library and written mainly in JavaScript (93%) as well as HTML and CSS.
Components
/src/components/Sidebar/SideAnnouncement.js
Proposal
Currently the announcements shown in this block are more or less hard-coded. The block does have logic to determine whether the current user has voted for 
It would be better if fresh news of the platform's growth and changes appear in this block. Presently such news is most prominently published in posts to the blockchain and then announced on the project's Discord server. This is good. But adding the latest news to the Announcement sidebar would increase visibility further.
The call to action for witness voting should be kept as is.
There are several ways the proposed feature could be implemented. One possibility is to modify the component to read from an RSS feed. A utility Discord bot could be built (or an existing one used/modified) to selectively write new posts in the #annoucements channel to this feed.
Mockups / Examples
And...
Presto! Active users (off Discord) are kept in the loop.
Benefits
The main benefit of this change is increased visibility for recent announcements pertinent to Utopian users. For example, I am often at work when announcements are made on Discord so I may not have time to keep up to date as news comes out in chat.
It's when a user is viewing a page on Utopian.io that attention is on related activity. This is a prime time to make users aware of important information and potentially prompt contributors take action relevant to the latest developments.
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors