Hi @lextenebris !
isn't it a little bit absurd to be running a contest for the creation of a mascot while your website and part of the your backend burned down due to internal arson? While you don't actually have a functional interface for providing real support to the community?
Absolutely not absurd. While the development and product design teams are working on developing a frontend and restoring all services from the technical aspect, our content and community engagement teams are continuing work on previously planned projects and initiatives that are not frontend reliant.
sometimes you need busywork for the peons
Peons? Hardly! More like continuous interaction and engagement with our awesome community of contributors, that was somewhat shifted to our steemit blog due to the current lack of a frontend for Utopian.
Basically? While the tech geniuses do their magic, the content team (myself included) see no reason to stop doing our part to reach out, listen and engage the utopian user community.
Then, and I'm going to put this gently, probably what you should be doing is engaging with content which drives the open source community and not soliciting free art. Certainly not soliciting free art which you don't have a place to put.
You could be more actively promoting open source projects of various sorts, branching out into new forms of promoting those who are trying to work to create content and get it recognized by the platform – but what you need is an anthropomorphic representation?
You do receive the ludicrous nature of that, right? It inverts the ostensible purpose of Utopian from the promotion of the open source community to the promotion of its own masturbatory self.
The last thing that Utopian is is a cute mascot. Of far more importance would be figuring out some way to actually make contributor content visible. You know, the underlying base idea of Utopian.
Without that, it's just one more pile of SP that votes up the insiders.
One does not negate the other. Branding doesn't come at the expense of the development of content discovery tools for the community, or instead of a content plan across various channels where Utopian can reach the open source community on and off the blockchain.
We're trying to do all of the above, and it's logical than not everyone will like all our ideas and initiatives.
I am more than willing to listen to any ideas you might have on how we can better create blog content which drives the open source community, and what other ways we can keep people involved as we develop the frontend. Feel free to look me up on the Utopian discord - same account name. Or just type in a reply. I am grateful in advance! <3