THE FINAL QUEST

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What a last couple of week it’s been! Thanks to @anomadsoul and @guyfawkes4-20’s initiative—backed by @voronoi and @hansikhouse—to hold a Summer Camp for the Sndbox 2018 applicants who desire a relatively easier entry, I have gotten to work with some great individuals on an amazing project with so much potential.

but first of all, SNDBOX

For those who don’t know, Sndbox is an incubator on the Steem Blockchain built to educate and empower its members both professionally and financially, over a period of time. Their goal is to create an environment where Creatives, entrepreneurs, educators and community organizers can explore, innovate and have fun while being rewarded for doing what they love.

You can learn more about @sndbox by reading their introduction post here. For now, allow me to move on to....

The Summer Camp

Traditionally one can only be a member of sndbox by filling an application form or getting nominated by an existing member. Thanks to @guyfawkes4-20 and @anomadsoul, however, a third option was presented—i.e, participating in a Summer Camp where a handful of individuals (10) would get the opportunity to become full-fledged @sndbox members.

To get into the camp we were asked to perform various tasks based on our various fields of interest. The final task for those of us who qualified was to choose a project among a few options, work on making that project better, and preparing a proposal to Sndbox.

I chose to work on @joedukeg’s CELF project for a quite a few reasons. First of all CELF is a curation project aimed specifically at supporting artists and creatives on the Blockchain—a goal not so different from @sndbox’s. With CELF, however, acting under the support and guidance of @sndbox, there is an opportunity to reach farther, and impact more creative steemians who deserve to get rewarded for their various works.

Having obtained some valuable experience in curation by curating for @curie lately, I got to discover the host of creative artists and writers on steemit who are grossly under rewarded for their works. It was no surprise then that after acquainting myself with CELF, I became impressed and itched to be a part of it.

THE CELF PROJECT

What impressed me most about the CELF project is that, like Sndbox, and unlike most curation initiatives on the blockchain, with CELF the emphasis is not just on monetary curation—i.e upvotes alone—but also what we term Social Curation--which is the kind of curation that emphasizes interaction, engagement, and constructive criticism to bring the best out of its members.

The Group

@joedukeg, @irma27 @mariska.lubis, @fivefiveeleven and I made up the CELF group.

Admittedly it took us a while to get going, and I was scared we were going to fall behind at first, considering the time difference, but how wrong I was! Once everybody got acquainted ideas began to flow and we worked at such a remarkable pace that we got all our ideas ready well before the deadline.

CELF and Diversifying

Since CELF had been an existing project well before the Sndbox quest, first thing I did was get myself acclimatized with the existing protocols. After joining the CELF Discord Server I found it was all still in Spanish (since CELF was conceived initially for Latin Americans), so first thing I did was talk to the group about diversifying CELF and making it bilingual. It turns out, too, that @joedukeg had also come to this conclusion earlier, and was already planning to make CELF a space for artists from all over the world regardless of their languages and nationalities.

We began to make the server bilingual—English and Spanish—but then @irma27 and @mariska.lubis came up with the idea of diversifying even further by also incorporating Indonesian curation. And whats more, (hopefully) we hope that with time as CELF grows bigger more curators from different nationalities will come in and we can keep on growing even bigger.

Securing C-squared Support

Now seeing as CELF is still very young and upcoming, securing more support is an absolute imperative, and lucky for us at that moment another curation initiative whose visions were also in line with CELF’s was been created--that is the Curation Collective(@-squared). So I suggested to the group that we team up with @c-squared, and since their aim is to support all curation effort on the Steem blockchain, I had no doubt that CELF would be given a warm welcome.

The group agreed to it and joined the @c-squared server, where we were given the ability to drop posts curated by CELF for additional consideration by the @c-squared reviewers, thereby giving more support ad exposure to CELF-curated authors and artists.

More on Social Curation

Like I said earlier, what fascinated me most about CELF was its emphasis on social curation, and so it was only natural that I spent a good amount of time pondering on how to improve on that subject matter. I came up with the idea of promoting interaction among CELF members by having a dedicated channel on CELF Discord Server which will be used exclusively for mentoring, exchanging ideas and giving constructive feedbacks.

Also I suggested encouraging encouragement by rewarding users with the most constructive interactions on a weekly basis. I believe all these go a long way in encouraging members to engage in social curation which, of course, is one of the main purpose of CELF.

Collaboration With Speak-Freely T.V

Among the project options we had, another that knocked my socks off apart from CELF was Cahlen's Speak-Freely TV. It was such a unique and thoughtful project that, perhaps for some sentimental reasons--since I've always had a dream of moving somewhere reclusive and enjoying my Henry David Thoreau dream--I thoroughly identified with it.

The project is mainly about helping people speak out about their emotions and (mostly) their emotional challenges and things they're passing through. And since I believe that this kind of self expression is not only artistic, but is art itself--since that's the reason most art are made, to help us and other people heal, I felt basically we could help with that project by collaborating and adding posts made with the speak-freely tag part of things we curate at CELF.

The group loved the idea and @joedukeg even suggested that we encourage the artists curated by CELF to make Speak-Freely videos of their own--if they're comfortable with it, of course. I promptly contacted @cahlen and he loved the idea too. Hopefully in the future we can have even more collaboration with Speak-Freely and other projects, of course.

CELF Magazine, Website

At the moment CELF has no website, to wrap things up I suggested making a CELF website, perhaps with some of the theoretical SBDs we were offered by Sndbox, with the rest of it going towards facilitating smooth functioning of the CELF magazine.

In Conclusion

Our group did not have the upper hands in terms of numbers, seeing as we were only five and some other groups had way more members, but like I found, having less members was a great advantage. It not only gave everyone equal space to express themselves, but also made our decision-making very fast and effective. I'm greatful to have been paired with such talented people. And again major appreciation to @guyfawkes4-20 and @anomadsoul for putting their time and energy into putting this together. It truly was a fun ride!