Utopian Now - Contributions Are Welcome

in #utopian-io7 years ago (edited)

Despite recent events and obstacles, Utopian will continue to incentivize and support valuable contributions to open source. As we focus on developing a robust and scalable Utopian.io, our curation team will continue to seek out, review and score contributions to be rewarded.

Currently, Utopian is adopting a curation framework that was tested by many curation initiatives on the steem blockchain, and offers higher rewards and more freedom to the Utopian contributor community.

While we continue our journey in rewarding quality contributions, the Utopian.io frontend will initially be restored for moderation purposes only.

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Utopian.io was born seven months ago as a one-man mission to create an open source economy to empower open source projects and contributors worldwide by utilizing the power of the steem blockchain.

Many blocks on the blockchain were signed since then, and in those short seven months, Utopian.io turned into a brand, and a successful initiative attracting contributors, open source project owners and investors. Moreover, it became an organization and a community - decentralized, driven and united behind a common goal - doing good for open source.

Utopian.io is not a platform or a frontend - it’s an ideal.

With the recent unfortunate security breach to our servers that caused our users’ authentication tokens to be compromised, it was obvious Utopian has grown beyond the framework it was initially built on, both technologically and in terms of organizational processes.

The current Utopian.io frontend will require multiple audits in terms of security and scalability as we focus on the development of a solution to better suit the community and its needs. While we build a better Utopian.io interface for you, the resources and power entrusted to us by our delegators will be used to keep doing what we have always aimed to do - reward quality contributions.

How Can I Submit Posts for Curation by Utopian?

While there is currently no dedicated frontend for contribution submission, our activity in incentivizing and rewarding high-quality contributions to the open source ecosystem will continue through manual curation by our team of moderators and community managers. You can create and submit posts using your favorite steem interface (steemit.com, busy.org, esteem, etc.) and they will be reviewed and rewarded.

Tags

All posts tagged with the main tag #utopian-io and the target category tag, will be reviewed by our team, and the selected contributions will be upvoted (as previously) by the @utopian-io account. It is important to note that only contribution submissions that adhere to Utopian Posting Guidelines and are correctly tagged will be reviewed.

To ensure our team finds and reviews your posts promptly, please use a secondary category tag for your posts as detailed below

Contribution tag
Category Tag
Suggestions ideas
Development development
Graphics graphics
Bugs bug-hunting
Analysis analysis
Visibility social
Video Tutorials video-tutorials
Tutorials tutorials
Copywriting copywriting
Documentation documentation
Blog blog
Task Request tag
Category Tag
Tasks for Bug Hunters task-bug-hunting
Tasks for Analysts task-analysis
Tasks for Influencers task-social
Tasks for Designers task-graphics
Tasks for Developers task-development
Tasks for Tech Writers task-documentation
Tasks for Copywriters task-copywriting

Templates

Contribution submissions and tasks are reviewed if they are correctly tagged, structured, detailed according to the category template, and adherent to Utopian Posting Rules and Guidelines.

To ensure your contribution or task request is reviewed and discovered, please use relevant template from the list below:

Category Template
Suggestions View template
Development View template
Graphics View template
Bugs View template
Analysis View template
Visibility View template
Video Tutorials View template
Tutorials View template
Copywriting View template
Documentation View template
Blog View template
Task Requests View template

Review Process:

Once your post is submitted onto the blockchain one of our Moderators or Community Managers assigned to the category will review it. Every contribution may wait up 72 hours before being reviewed and eligible for an Utopian upvote. The submissions are scored according to predefined questionnaires, and only contributions that receive the highest score will be added the voting round.

Posts submitted to the Utopian tags will not be "accepted" or "rejected", but instead may receive moderator comments with valuable feedbacks. The top posts will be upvoted from the daily queue, rewarding the contributions with the highest value to the community as quantified by the moderation scoring criteria. If your post was not upvoted during the first 72 hours, it is safe to assume it did not qualify for a reward.

Zero Beneficiaries:

Thanks to our users being able to freely choose the platform they want to post from, Utopian will not enforce any beneficiaries on these submissions, essentially allowing them to earn 15% more for their contributions. We are hoping this can further encourage our users to spend their time and invest their skills in contributing to open source projects.

Sponsors Rewards

To ensure weekly sponsor payouts are remain unaffected, we will be using our curation rewards instead of beneficiary rewards to distribute the sponsor payouts.

Utopian Looking Forward:

While it is easy to see this shift to manual curation as a step back in user experience, we strongly believe that this small step will enable big leaps forward. With our focus shifted from supporting and maintaining a flawed application, we can allocate our resources towards the development of a new and improved Utopian at a pace faster than would otherwise be possible.

While development is ongoing, we will keep engaging the community on Discord and incentivising the Utopian team to do so as well. Among others, we are planning to launch a series of teaching sessions and webinars, as well as a content magazine, topical curation digest and other exciting surprises.

We want to turn this unfortunate event into an opportunity to move forward and reboot Utopian as the paradise it is meant to be for Project Owners and passionate open source contributors.

On behalf of everyone at Utopian, we thank you for your continued support in these challenging times, and invite you to share your insights and ideas with us on our Discord server.

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Moderators are no longer required to leave comments related to the review process, although they’re still encouraged to leave relevant feedback at their own discretion. If your post was not upvoted during the first 72 hours, it is safe to assume it did not qualify for a reward.

It's very important to have a clearly communicated decision: yes or no, ideally with some explanation in the latter case. Keep in mind that without the Utopian interface it's even easier to make a mistake while submitting.

Posts have a limited window in which to earn rewards from all sources. A 72-hour silent rejection versus early feedback that can be addressed makes a significant difference.

Moderators do make mistakes. I've had it happen on one of my own contributions. It was addressed with patience and decorum on both sides. But if @knowledges had never mentioned his reasons to me that conversation would never have happened.

I would not have known if I'd been overlooked, ignored, or rejected — I would have been discouraged and received a disincentive. This will happen to someone if feedback is not consistently given.

Disincentive is the opposite of the mission for Utopian's OS economy, is it not @elear?

The moderators are fine people and I'm confident their discretion will guide them to leave a comment in most cases. Nevertheless removing the clear expectation that submissions will receive at least acknowledgement leaves contributors in the dark for too long.

I made it a point to offer verbose feedback every time I scored and have always gotten a positive reaction for that. Some have even pointed to such feedback as a motivator and part of the incentive. I know it is for me.

So while I know Utopian has a lot to deal with right now and that feedback may seem like a dispensable detail — consider that it may not be so small a thing. Utopian is still a young brand and many people are still forming that crucial first impression.

I hope everyone will comment when they moderate.

I do agree on each and every single point here. I think the post missed to explain this properly and I am gonna edit it asap.

We don't encourage adding comments for "rejection" since different frontends are used where the "rejection" mechanism does not exist and may harm the user at the end leaving a "rejection" comment without an current implementation in our interface for that.

We will make sure to provide valuable and informative comments in any case to help the contributor improve, whether the post will be eligible for an upvote or not.

You're so on top of it. I love this place. :)

I agree with all of this as well. Thus far I have posted almost 70 contributions to Utopian in the past 4 months and even then I have still encountered some problems as a result of miscommunications and misinformation. It can be frustrating to put so much work into a post but not know what is going on with it. In most cases, Its better to know even if the outcome is negative.

So true. Feedback is key to good development and good design. Thank you @tdre

Wow "Utopian.io is not a platform or a frontend - it’s an ideal." You have proved this promise. Thanks for all the hardworks. We always support Utopian.

We appreciate your kind words @pars11.

Thank you too Mo!

Good work Utopian team! That's a good set of solutions given current difficulties and a generous offer for contributors. Thank you!

Thank you. Your kind words are well appreciated :)

LONG LIVE UTOPIAN! HERE HERE!

WE ARE UTOPIAN.

We sure are! :-)

Utopian.io is not a platform or a frontend - it’s an ideal.

👏
Commendable work being transparent about the breach and quickly working to continue the Utopian-io mission despite the setback.

Thanks to all the work by the team, you are appreciated. 👊

At such moments, it turns out how powerful the Utopian is. My congratulations to the whole team for exemplary mobilization.

Thanks for your support

Thanks for that @radudangratian

The most captivating part of this post "Utopian-io isn't just a Front-end, it's an ideal".. Big Big accolades to the team..

Utopian-io will rise above every issue..

We sure will. Thank you for such a kind word and for believing in us

Thanks @kekegist. We appreciate the support.

Credit to the team there for what will have been managing a stressful situation. Sounds like a very pragmatic and sensible solution. As a currently single occasion contributor I think this will be actually marginally easier for me to contribute, and sounds as though you have all the back office functions to apply the various rules, guidelines and potential upvotes. Businesses/Organisations can grow too fast. Fact. It sounds very sensible to take stock, learn and build a stronger foundation from which you can confidently grow.

Absolutely! You perfectly got the point here!

Great work and we've managed to get out our development progress update. Thanks for all the work your team do and we look forward to the new improved interface.

If you're not moving forward then check to make sure you aren't going backwards either

Awesome! Utopian made a great solution to support user to contribution on opensource project! Thank you for your hard work!

Thanks for the support @yandot

And thank you too for supporting us :)