Announcing Sndcastle Projects - A New Model for Cultivating Community Growth and Engagement on Steemit

Sndbox is a global incubator project striving to integrate STEEM and other blockchain resources into creative and community initiatives.

Sndcastles and Kickstarting Community Engagement

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Sndcastle Projects are a new collaborative initiative of Sndbox. We’re working with Steemit community leaders around the world to foster social, creative, and community impact. Our aim is to support and promote Steemit accelerator hubs, encouraging meetups, onboarding and local hotspots.

This is how it will work: Steemit users who want to develop an accelerator hub in their city, region, or country can work with @sndbox to develop customized resources, workshop activities, and programs that bring on “users with roots” - Steemians who have a local network and community to engage and support them. In exchange for development support, these hubs will nominate select new members to the @sndbox incubator each month. (This is part of how our incubator expects to grow.) Our @sndbox network will develop organically through this nomination network with the aim of establishing community hotspots that receive consistent support through a global network.

Our decision to work on this initiative with both veteran and new Steemians came about due to a number of pressing questions for the Steemit platform -

1. Can we break down language barriers?

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	Cultural and language barriers alone bar us from so many of our fellow Steemians and their valuable content. Some parts of the world have failed to develop a presence on Steemit simply due to lack of whale support of their country or tongue. Sndcastles are an effort to break down those barriers and bridge parallel region-based communities.

2. Can we encourage healthier curation?

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	For the most part (until now) individual curators have been given delegation support or curation power. But tying curatorial responsibilities to a personal account can be dangerous, oftentimes leading to abuse and misuse. We want to make curation and community support more collaborative and trust-based.

3. Can we improve on the “Meetup” model?

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	In the past few months, we’ve seen regional Meetups become a mainstay in the Steemit community from NYC to Munich to Manila. After trying out several events and gaining feedback from our own Meetups, we understood that they could be much more than just social gatherings. Gatherings could be an educational resource.

Our mission is to address these questions by continuing to mobilize and innovate with different forms of organization and programming.

Sndcastle Goals

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Our collaborative Sndcastles are structured and programmed to meet these goals -

• Combine onboarding activities with education. It’s one thing to tell new people about Steemit, it’s a whole different thing to teach them how to use the platform. Much of the material, presentations, and online/offline activities will be designed to get new users quickly accustomed and comfortable with the ins and outs of Steemit.

• Nurture a trust-based system. In-person activities offer a great opportunity to nurture relationships and built trust between users. These forms of bonds also help dissuade account and tag abuse as well as cultivate more active usership. For us at @sndbox, it provides a referral system for potential Sndbox members around the world.

• Encourage more collaborative initiatives. As regional communities grow with more members and diverse accounts, we’ll be able to help them mobilize further with collaborative projects and programs.

Upvoting Guidelines

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The @sndbox collective vote will be reserved for the support of hubs, incubator members as well as all Steemians with similar community impact + creative missions in mind.

^	Who?
+100%	Sndbox Incubator Members
+100%	Sndcastle Hubs
+50%	High-impact physical projects / initiatives (Example: STEEM Park)
+20%	Introduction posts promoted by Sndcastle Hubs
+20%	New Steemians (under the introduceyourself tag with strong content related to creative or community practices)

We also want to make sure that abuse of the vote does not occur internally and is not used for purposes other than our core mission of impact oriented content. @Sndbox will not vote on content from personal accounts @voronoi and @hansikhouse. We will also not vote on member posts that fail to meet quality standards we aim to uphold.

Our First Sndcastle Projects

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This week, we have the pleasure of announcing two of our first Sndcastle Projects- @tach and @stach!

• @tach - Turkish ACelerator Hub - is led by @monomyth. @tach has already gathered a tight-knit and dedicated Turkish community who are all committed to building the TR community. Explore all the details of what they are planning in their recent introduction post.

• @stach - STeem ACcelerator Hub - is led by @ejemai to form a dedicated space and ongoing in-person program for the Nigerian community in Port Harcourt. You can show your support and follow their progress here.

We’ll be working closely with these community leaders and Sndcastle members (a few more to come soon).

The Future

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We're excited to launch this new initiative! During the next few months, we’ll report back on all the metrics, development and activity. We’re open all ideas, suggestions and criticisms. Let us know your thoughts below! If we you want to read more on the topic of healthy community building, we recommend you check out the following posts -

@donkeypong’s Report on Steemit Hubs and Meetups

@kevinwong’s Post on the Steemit Collaborative Commons

@clayop’s Proposal to Cope with Abusers