We (@steemstem) felt that an update as to the status of the project was long overdue!

This (somewhat lengthy) post will inform you on the progress that we have made in the last few months, our current philosophy regarding supporting STEM content on Steemit, our desire to grow and nurture a community of STEM content creators, and some plans/ideas we have for the future of the project.

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What is SteemSTEM?

The steemSTEM project is a community-oriented initiative to increase both the quality as well as the visibility of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) posts on Steemit.

Discussion revolving around STEM disciplines are not just niche topics, but rather core subjects essential to the long term growth and development of Steemit. We believe that a thriving Steemit STEM community is crucial for providing support and encouraging further development of current skilful bloggers, as well as recruiting outside talent. Each is necessary for achieving our mission to provide Steemit with quality, interesting and cutting edge STEM content.

The project seeks in part to accomplish these goals through the direct promotion of quality content posted on Steemit. Quality assessment of content is achieved by a team of curators with expertise in various STEM disciplines working on behalf of the community. Curation by @steemstem is further aided by a collaboration with @curie through its Community Support program.

Curation Progress

Since the initiation of the collaboration with @curie 18 weeks ago, the SteemSTEM project curation team has supported over 3432 posts, of which 2480 posts received votes from both the @steemstem and @curie voting trails. This corresponds to 686 unique authors upvoted by @steemstem, and 544 unique authors upvoted both by @steemstem and @curie.

Our Weekly Curation Digest: SteemSTEM Distilled

Members of the curation team have also begun assembling a weekly curation digest (Issue: [#1], [#2], [#3], [#4], [#5], [#6], [#7], [#8], [#9],[#10],[#11],[#12],[#13],[#14],[#15],[#16],[#17]) highlighing one exceptional post from each day of the week as a means to provide further exposure for excellent content creators; as well as provide examples that other community members can learn from to improve their own blogging skills.

What Are The Criterion Used by the SteemSTEM Curation Team When Voting on Posts?

One question which community members frequently ask is “What do the curators look for when selecting content for votes?”

As explained in detail in this post, four requirements are in order. An authors' post must be original, well written (using clear English), well formatted (easy to read) and not plaggiarized (or translated from foreign sources).

Moreover, being recognized by @steemSTEM means more that just being rewarded for his/her blog. It means that the author is engaged with our vibrant community through posts, participation on the chat (on the steemit chat or discord) and through comments on the articles of other STEM authors.

Sub-communities

The steemSTEM team members understand that our standards require a high level English proficiency that not all members of our growing community may possess. We recognize that this is both unfair, and also is closing the door on a chance to educate and inform more people. To enable users to be able to create content that is keeping with the SteemSTEM qualilty guidelines, but written in their own native languages we have begun establishing sub communities with curators/managers who have both scientific expertise as well as any needed language expertise. Each community has chosen a unique tag for users to use to better enable identification of local or non-english STEM content of high quality.

To date collaborations with the following communities have been established:

Community/Language	group tag	managers/curators
Nigerian	stemng	@greenrun
		@gentleshaid
Italian	itastem/scienze	@aboutcoolscience
French	franco-stem	@guga34
		@kingswisdom
Spanish		@carloserp-2000
		@iamphysical

We thank each of these sub-community managers for their efforts to expand the spread of quality STEM content on steemit. We look forward to assisting them in growing the size of these communities and bringing more great content creators to our platform.

Additional Projects Supported

In addition to the project’s curation function, we also encourage and support various community member initiatives through the donation of STEEM POWER as rewards for their participants. Since the previous update we have supported the following projects/contests:

• @kenchung

  • Mathematics Programming Competition #5
  • Mathematics Programming Competition #6
  • Mathematics Programming Competition #7
  • Mathematics Programming Competition #8

• @suesa

  • Suesa's Science Challenge #2
  • Suesa's Science Challenge #3 - A Very Science Christmas

• @mystifact

  • Mystifact-or-Fiction Challenge #1
  • Mystifact-or-Fiction Challenge #2

• @biuiam

  • SteemSTEM Science Fair

• @curiousity

  • Curiousity Science Contest

• @mcw

  • Christmas: Science Picture Challenge

Potential/Likely Future Projects

Disclaimer: All projects discussed below are tentative, and require future developments by either Steemit Inc. or other community developers as well as collaborations between the SteemSTEM team and other generous Steemit community members/developers.

Implementation of a STEM Community SMT

Steemit’s recent announcement of Smart Media Tokens and their intended use to aid in the development of internet communities provides us the opportunity to implement a secondary token revolving around the creation of STEM content. We have teamed up with @reggaemuffin who has offered to help us with the technical side of creating an SMT.

Currently the finer details of how these tokens will function have not yet been completely revealed. It is nevertheless our intention to utilize this new technology to continue to build the STEM community on Steemit as soon as possible.

The steemSTEM community is not just those of us in the SteemSTEM management and curation teams, but actually all of you as well. Implementing a SMT needs to be done in the right way: one which will help the community grow! This means that we will need your help in deciding what to do with these tokens. Please drop by our channels on the steemit chat and/or on discord, or leave a comment below if you have any suggestions about the way in which one should implement the token to encourage excellence in STEM content. This is a community project, and a SteemSTEM SMT would be a COMMUNITY token, one that we are all proud to distribute and use to promote STEM the world over.

Also, if you have not checked out the SMT White Paper, you can also do that Here. Perhaps you will find some inspiration by reading through it!

An Official SteemSTEM/STEM Community

The steemSTEM team, much like everyone on the platform, is extremely excited at the prospects of official communities being implemented on steemit. We have been trying our best to organically grow the group of posters who possess a likeminded vision that high quality, interesting, well cited and well formatted blog posts will illustrate to the masses that steemit THE place to go to read about Science and Tech. In recent months the community size has increased to almost 2100 followers of the @steemstem project account and over 600 members on steemit.chat. The current (and growing) size of the community will to enable us to rapidly transition to official community status as soon as the Steemit Inc developers deploy the platform update.

The SteemSTEM Meetup At The Large Hadron Colider

As many of you are aware we (well mostly @lemouth) have been planning and organizing the first ever SteemSTEM meetup. Not to be outdone by other communities @lemouth wanted to help us bring our A-Game and meet somewhere that many scientists only dream to go. The worlds largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, in located Geneva Switzerland at CERN. As the corner stone of this meetup the group of attendees will be going down into the LHC to see the Compact Muon Solenoid detector, where researchers use a massive solenoid magnet to generate a magnetic field 100,000 times the strength of our planet's, to bend the beam of subatomic particles generated by the collisions. Pretty cool destination, and an amazing opportunity to promote both STEEM/Steemit and the SteemSTEM project! Don't ya think? To date 18 people have been confirmed to participate, however for those unable to make the trip, worry not! We plan to take plenty of pictures and also do some video recording to bring the experience home for you all to share as well. This looks to be an amazing community building event!

The Future Is Bright, Our Community Is Vibrant

Finally, we would like to take a moment in this closing section to thank our community members for the great discussions that we have in the group chat on steemit.chat (https://steemit.chat/channel/steemSTEM) and more recently on discord too, as well as for their enthusiasm for what we are trying to do; enthusiasm which can be seen in our winning the award for best public chat on steemit.chat, a testament to the supportive atmosphere that the community keeps and the enthusiasm they share for each others’ content and STEM as a whole.

We strive to keep our steemit.chat and discord channels positive places where users who are creating STEM content can discuss whatever they want. It’s not just about chatting science, it’s our place to get to know one another, and to help build the relationships that will allow for a network that can support one another! Our community is about helping each other grow on steemit.

Thank You All for your support of this project, for creating the wonderful content that you do, for your passion for the fascinating mysteries of the world, and for allowing us the privilege of building this community.

Cheers!

The SteemSTEM Team:

Curators
@ruth-girl
@trumpman
@zest
@kryzsec

Management Team
@mobbs
@suesa
@anarchyhasnogods

Founders
@lemouth
@justtryme90