In today's show which takes place monthly and is hosted by 
Firstly, Witnesses...
A Witness plays a crucial part in how the STEEM network functions; what are their key tasks?
They're the main producer of blocks (not miners)
They maintain a price feed, which is how SBD functions
They play the role of consensus (decide whether to hard fork or not)
A witness is paid proportionally to how high they are in the witness ranks, and they get voted in, by people like you.
Cast your 30 votes here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Show format and contents
Firstly,
He then asked a couple of questions to the group to which anyone could respond.
These are my notes taken during the show which lasted approximately 2 hours and can be listened to here.
The previous 
Much time and energy was used re-engineering solving practical and critcal problems, and communication had to take the back seat.
The recent
2017 was a challenging year, but 'we' are through it.
Appbase - Should help querying the STEEM Blockchain quicker.
Question from
Agile methodology is new to the team. Work is focused around 'Sprints', allowing short meaningful progress to be made.
'The best way to communicate is to put out frequent content and engage and comment on that...'
I think this stands for all members of the community.
next on the mic
Shifting his focus since becoming a Witness over a year ago from producing content to now providing support to key areas of focus.
One of these key areas being the promotion of the STEEM Blockchain, to bother new users and investors.
'If we can convince people that Steem is the currency that will take the blockchain to the masses...'
I agree that we are onto a winner if this happens.
Tim sees the need for communities and better 'hand-holding' as we grow, and believes the platform is on a good course right now.
Since starting out as a blogger in the main,
- Spread the values of PAL - Peace, Abundance, and Liberty
- Train and encourage new users
- Promote STEEM inside and outside the community
()
Curie is a community curation organisation and community witness with an aim to find and promote authors who have found little success thus far on the platform.
'Making sure Proof of brain is not just an empty slogan'
Voting on exceptional content, giving promising authors a stake
Curie top curators, reviewers and operators have an equal vote in witness decisions regardless of SP - many of the stakeholders are Minnows.
Furion is a Witness and a developer.
Hi main projects right now are steempython (https://steem.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) and steemdata (https://steemdata.com/)
At any one time, there can be over 200 open connections to steemdata, which is testament to the popularity of the project.
The plan for this year - more applications on the way, solidifying steemdata.
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Recent involvements with 
Helping to support Steemit meetups - Universities in Venezuela
'The average income of a teacher in Venezuela is $4 a month'
It's easy to see just how big an impact STEEM could have in that part of the world.
-
He is 1 of the 4 members of the
- nozzel rpc client
- Open source voting bot with a unique feature of 1 vote per user per day (even if they post 4/5/6 times)
- steemify notification app for IOS, with a nice feature to switch user to and receive notifications from another account. Steemify is currently being developed for Android.
- Turbine - early warning system for witness nodes - coming soon - open source
A question to the forum
What are some of the biggest challenges on the STEEM Blockchain right now?
- efficient signups
- scalability
- fair distribution of rewards and getting noticed
Time believes the first two to be under control, and that communities and SMTs will be an aid towards the balancing of rewards
- Curation isn't incentivised so well
- No Front-End currently focused on curation.
Any curation community will be able to use the front end. It will have a submission system and is likely to replace Streemian.
'It's a hard time getting started'.
How I made $0.07 in 5 posts and how you can too!
(He must be happy, this one made 17 cents!)
A concern about user retention if people don't find a home or a community.
'Like singing your heart out to an empty auditorium'
A potential problem in the future is how the blockspace is being used - Posts consuming blockspace forever - could be a problem in future
A possible solution: A fee for the blockspace (to produce a Post) and or to penalise spammers
Images are currently off (Block)chain, it could be an option to ould take the posts out too if their are space issues in future.
Content discoverability.
It seems the Spanish community is not waiting for 'Communities'!
Very happy, the 'dark ages' look to be in the past.
Curating the home page is impossible, Communities could help solve this.
If any of the speakers feel misrepresented by the notes above please let me know!
My thoughts on the show
To me, this monthly show is the next best thing to being at Steemfest. So much of the latest goings on are covered in this 2 hour slot, and I think you should try to attend if possible.
Generally, it sound like good progress is being made, both buy Steemit.inc, and the Witnesses working on their individual focus areas.
I find the show comforting, as an (small fry) investor, and member, and it's great to see the presence of 
My one gripe is that (occasionally), good questions are put into the chat during the show but are missed due to the speed of the chat, and the focus being on 'talk' and not reading.
I wonder if it would be possible to have a 'question box' which is reviewed by a channel mod to pick out the best questions for the speakers to answer at the end?
I shall leave you with 3 questions and statements which would perhaps be of interest to hear feedback on.
In relation to onboarding Merchants:
In relation to support from Curation teams supporting up and coming authors and the apparent lack of support for those 'in the middle' of the reputation scale:
I hope you found this content useful and wish you a good weekend
