Steem Witness forum- The Recording! - Value and Organization

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Well, I don't know about you, but I thought the Steem Witness Forum went great. Hive account@andrarchy kicked us off by talking about what Steemit has been up to. Seems like the most important word that came out of that was "Organization." To me it sounded like Steemit has some lofty and tough objectives to meet for a variety of big code changes to a heavily used program and one of the most important aspects to achieving their goal is company organization. I pressed him a little about making sure things are delivered and he hit right back with just how much has already been accomplished.

I did my best to productively share some of the concerns that I hear in the Minnow Support Project, understand some of how hard it can be to "repair the spaceship while it's flying," and try to do it in a way that isn't disrespecting Steemit or Andrarchy. I do think there's going to be some amount of irony here... As you may have seen Hive account@yabapmatt and I lauched the alpha release of Steem Monsters (steemmonsters.com and Hive account@steemmonsters), and we're already getting product requests! Looks like I'll be spearheading some effort to control expectations and figure out deadlines etc to share with our userbase when folks can expect things and how well we execute on them. I did my best to be respectful of Andrarchy and Steemit. I'm a huge fan of both. You can be the judge of how well I did that. Andrew is top class and here's hoping you feel better bud. I hear rest.exe will be incorporated sometime in 2020.

Witnesses

We switched gears somewhere about an hour into the show to go from a general Steemit discussion with andrarchy to one focused on the witnesses. Everyone gave a brief introduction. People spoke some about what they're working on and what's important to them. Then I tried to steer the conversation to what's going to happen 6 months to a year from now. While I can't speak for Steemit I imagine that velocity, SMTs, communities, appbase, and rocksdb conversions will have all taken place. I think the witnesses are extremely aligned that these are the priorities right now. Once that's done it's not quite as clear as what the next step is or what the priority(ies) should be be.

One term that kept surfacing was value. The discussion was around how do we create and bring value to the Steem blockchain. That seems to have been in contrast to how do I extract value from the Steem Blockchain. The discussion also showed that adding value can come in many flavors. Specifically many of the folks there seemed to have some pretty different ideas as to what adds value to the chain, and that came off as very healthy that we have people with different skill sets looking to the future and to the present.