Thank you for this post. It is important that the steemstem 'board' shares its concerns with the base member/poster, so that we can all try and give a helping hand.
I wonder actually how you distribute the scanning of the articles between the curators just based on the Steemstem tag. How does one curator knows that an article has already been screaned, avoiding repeating work carried out by another curator?
I would suggest that all Steemstem articles be tagged Steemstem + another keyword specific to the group. For example if I write an article about electric fields, I would need to tag it: #steemstem and #steemstemphysics. A list of valid secondary tags would be set and communicated to the community.
A curator would be assigned to a specific secondary tag. He/she then can list all articles under his wing, knowing that these have not been screened previously. That should optimise the work.
As a second point, if there are not enough curators for the mass of articles that pop up everyday, I would defined two types of curators and an administrator:
1st class curators: those that wish to curate on dayly basis, like currently.
2nd class curators: those that can curate one set day (or more) a week.
Administrator: person that organises the curating schedule for 2nd class curators.
Then there would be a call to application for 2nd class curators. Selection would be based on the quality of the blog of the applicant.
For example, I think I would enjoy very much curating for Steemstem, but my dynamic life would pevent me doing so on a daily basis reliably, and for extensive periods of time. There would be multiple curators for the same secondary keyword, each of them being assigned a day of the week by the administrator. The 2nd class curators + administrator system would probably bring quite a bol of fresh air to 1st class curators (those already existing).
So I am applying as 2nd class curator :-)!
I hope these ideas help. Be well.
These are all cool ideas but just a point to make:
The problem with expanding further is payment. Not only will people be working voluntarily, but they would need to take a pay cut because they would no longer be eligible for the curie half (the bigger half) of our votes. It's not easy for people to see the bigger picture of the community in this regard.
Even if this were the case, we have no more VP to give them even the steemSTEM half of rewards so they would basically be working without any extra entitlement to votes, and any vote they get would be a fraction of what it was. This makes it very difficult to find trustworthy, hardworking individuals who stay long term.
We've actually been extremely lucky so far finding the team we have gotten but as things grow, this kind of luck should be expected less. These are reasons why we decline very kind offers from individuals who want to help out; they essentially get punished for contributing to the cause.
Regarding distribution, again because we have a fairly small team, it's broken down quite simply and double screening happens rarely, something I notice perhaps once every week or less. This is because the core curators cover all time zones (me in Asia, JTM & kryzsec in North America and lemouth, trumpman, ruthgirl & zest in Europe/Africa time zones), and we simply cover a period of time available to us.
On top of that our sub-communities such as de-stem and stemng have their own secondary tags which we leave alone similar to your suggestion. I imagine when we are way bigger, secondary subject tags will likely be inevitable, assuming steemit.inc continues to not release a more workable interface.
Thanks for the ideas!