Despite recent events and obstacles, Utopian will continue to incentivize and support valuable contributions to open source. As we focus on developing a robust and scalable Utopian.io, our curation team will continue to seek out, review and score contributions to be rewarded.
Currently, Utopian is adopting a curation framework that was tested by many curation initiatives on the steem blockchain, and offers higher rewards and more freedom to the Utopian contributor community.
While we continue our journey in rewarding quality contributions, the Utopian.io frontend will initially be restored for moderation purposes only.
Utopian.io was born seven months ago as a one-man mission to create an open source economy to empower open source projects and contributors worldwide by utilizing the power of the steem blockchain.
Many blocks on the blockchain were signed since then, and in those short seven months, Utopian.io turned into a brand, and a successful initiative attracting contributors, open source project owners and investors. Moreover, it became an organization and a community - decentralized, driven and united behind a common goal - doing good for open source.
Utopian.io is not a platform or a frontend - it’s an ideal.
With the recent unfortunate security breach to our servers that caused our users’ authentication tokens to be compromised, it was obvious Utopian has grown beyond the framework it was initially built on, both technologically and in terms of organizational processes.
The current Utopian.io frontend will require multiple audits in terms of security and scalability as we focus on the development of a solution to better suit the community and its needs. While we build a better Utopian.io interface for you, the resources and power entrusted to us by our delegators will be used to keep doing what we have always aimed to do - reward quality contributions.
How Can I Submit Posts for Curation by Utopian?
While there is currently no dedicated frontend for contribution submission, our activity in incentivizing and rewarding high-quality contributions to the open source ecosystem will continue through manual curation by our team of moderators and community managers. You can create and submit posts using your favorite steem interface (steemit.com, busy.org, esteem, etc.) and they will be reviewed and rewarded.
Tags
All posts tagged with the main tag #utopian-io and the target category tag, will be reviewed by our team, and the selected contributions will be upvoted (as previously) by the @utopian-io account. It is important to note that only contribution submissions that adhere to Utopian Posting Guidelines and are correctly tagged will be reviewed.
To ensure our team finds and reviews your posts promptly, please use a secondary category tag for your posts as detailed below
Contribution tag
| Category | Tag |
| Suggestions | ideas |
| Development | development |
| Graphics | graphics |
| Bugs | bug-hunting |
| Analysis | analysis |
| Visibility | social |
| Video Tutorials | video-tutorials |
| Tutorials | tutorials |
| Copywriting | copywriting |
| Documentation | documentation |
| Blog | blog |
Task Request tag
| Category | Tag |
| Tasks for Bug Hunters | task-bug-hunting |
| Tasks for Analysts | task-analysis |
| Tasks for Influencers | task-social |
| Tasks for Designers | task-graphics |
| Tasks for Developers | task-development |
| Tasks for Tech Writers | task-documentation |
| Tasks for Copywriters | task-copywriting |
Templates
Contribution submissions and tasks are reviewed if they are correctly tagged, structured, detailed according to the category template, and adherent to Utopian Posting Rules and Guidelines.
To ensure your contribution or task request is reviewed and discovered, please use relevant template from the list below:
| Category | Template |
| Suggestions | View template |
| Development | View template |
| Graphics | View template |
| Bugs | View template |
| Analysis | View template |
| Visibility | View template |
| Video Tutorials | View template |
| Tutorials | View template |
| Copywriting | View template |
| Documentation | View template |
| Blog | View template |
| Task Requests | View template |
Review Process:
Once your post is submitted onto the blockchain one of our Moderators or Community Managers assigned to the category will review it. Every contribution may wait up 72 hours before being reviewed and eligible for an Utopian upvote. The submissions are scored according to predefined questionnaires, and only contributions that receive the highest score will be added the voting round.
Posts submitted to the Utopian tags will not be "accepted" or "rejected", but instead may receive moderator comments with valuable feedbacks. The top posts will be upvoted from the daily queue, rewarding the contributions with the highest value to the community as quantified by the moderation scoring criteria. If your post was not upvoted during the first 72 hours, it is safe to assume it did not qualify for a reward.
Zero Beneficiaries:
Thanks to our users being able to freely choose the platform they want to post from, Utopian will not enforce any beneficiaries on these submissions, essentially allowing them to earn 15% more for their contributions. We are hoping this can further encourage our users to spend their time and invest their skills in contributing to open source projects.
Sponsors Rewards
To ensure weekly sponsor payouts are remain unaffected, we will be using our curation rewards instead of beneficiary rewards to distribute the sponsor payouts.
Utopian Looking Forward:
While it is easy to see this shift to manual curation as a step back in user experience, we strongly believe that this small step will enable big leaps forward. With our focus shifted from supporting and maintaining a flawed application, we can allocate our resources towards the development of a new and improved Utopian at a pace faster than would otherwise be possible.
While development is ongoing, we will keep engaging the community on Discord and incentivising the Utopian team to do so as well. Among others, we are planning to launch a series of teaching sessions and webinars, as well as a content magazine, topical curation digest and other exciting surprises.
We want to turn this unfortunate event into an opportunity to move forward and reboot Utopian as the paradise it is meant to be for Project Owners and passionate open source contributors.
On behalf of everyone at Utopian, we thank you for your continued support in these challenging times, and invite you to share your insights and ideas with us on our Discord server.
It's very important to have a clearly communicated decision: yes or no, ideally with some explanation in the latter case. Keep in mind that without the Utopian interface it's even easier to make a mistake while submitting.
Posts have a limited window in which to earn rewards from all sources. A 72-hour silent rejection versus early feedback that can be addressed makes a significant difference.
Moderators do make mistakes. I've had it happen on one of my own contributions. It was addressed with patience and decorum on both sides. But if @knowledges had never mentioned his reasons to me that conversation would never have happened.
I would not have known if I'd been overlooked, ignored, or rejected — I would have been discouraged and received a disincentive. This will happen to someone if feedback is not consistently given.
Disincentive is the opposite of the mission for Utopian's OS economy, is it not @elear?
The moderators are fine people and I'm confident their discretion will guide them to leave a comment in most cases. Nevertheless removing the clear expectation that submissions will receive at least acknowledgement leaves contributors in the dark for too long.
I made it a point to offer verbose feedback every time I scored and have always gotten a positive reaction for that. Some have even pointed to such feedback as a motivator and part of the incentive. I know it is for me.
So while I know Utopian has a lot to deal with right now and that feedback may seem like a dispensable detail — consider that it may not be so small a thing. Utopian is still a young brand and many people are still forming that crucial first impression.
I hope everyone will comment when they moderate.
I do agree on each and every single point here. I think the post missed to explain this properly and I am gonna edit it asap.
We don't encourage adding comments for "rejection" since different frontends are used where the "rejection" mechanism does not exist and may harm the user at the end leaving a "rejection" comment without an current implementation in our interface for that.
We will make sure to provide valuable and informative comments in any case to help the contributor improve, whether the post will be eligible for an upvote or not.
You're so on top of it. I love this place. :)
I agree with all of this as well. Thus far I have posted almost 70 contributions to Utopian in the past 4 months and even then I have still encountered some problems as a result of miscommunications and misinformation. It can be frustrating to put so much work into a post but not know what is going on with it. In most cases, Its better to know even if the outcome is negative.
So true. Feedback is key to good development and good design. Thank you @tdre
Wow "Utopian.io is not a platform or a frontend - it’s an ideal." You have proved this promise. Thanks for all the hardworks. We always support Utopian.
Thank you
We appreciate your kind words @pars11.
Thank you.
Thank you too Mo!
Good work Utopian team! That's a good set of solutions given current difficulties and a generous offer for contributors. Thank you!
Thank you. Your kind words are well appreciated :)
LONG LIVE UTOPIAN! HERE HERE!
WE ARE UTOPIAN.
We sure are! :-)
👏
Commendable work being transparent about the breach and quickly working to continue the Utopian-io mission despite the setback.
Thanks to all the work by the team, you are appreciated. 👊
Thanks a lot @sambillingham !
At such moments, it turns out how powerful the Utopian is. My congratulations to the whole team for exemplary mobilization.
Thanks for your support
Thanks for that @radudangratian
The most captivating part of this post "Utopian-io isn't just a Front-end, it's an ideal".. Big Big accolades to the team..
Utopian-io will rise above every issue..
We sure will. Thank you for such a kind word and for believing in us
Thanks @kekegist. We appreciate the support.
Credit to the team there for what will have been managing a stressful situation. Sounds like a very pragmatic and sensible solution. As a currently single occasion contributor I think this will be actually marginally easier for me to contribute, and sounds as though you have all the back office functions to apply the various rules, guidelines and potential upvotes. Businesses/Organisations can grow too fast. Fact. It sounds very sensible to take stock, learn and build a stronger foundation from which you can confidently grow.
Absolutely! You perfectly got the point here!
Great work and we've managed to get out our development progress update. Thanks for all the work your team do and we look forward to the new improved interface.
Awesome! Utopian made a great solution to support user to contribution on opensource project! Thank you for your hard work!
Thanks for the support @yandot
And thank you too for supporting us :)
What about decentralized scoring system? Will we see it soon?
How do we know contribution is „approved”?
Hello @mys if your contribution was approved you will for sure get a comment and upvote from @utopian-io. Rejection now does not make sense to stay, so if you don't get an upvote and a comment from @utopian-io within 72 hours you may assume the post did not qualify.
I guess it will be better if you let us know
Thank you for this. I will write on tonight ^_^
i dont get this part.
It means that moderators, while moderating a contribution, use a category-specific questionnaire (found here: https://review.utopian.io/ ) which leads to a score percentage for your contribution, which then gets multiplied by the category "max voting percentage", which equals the voting power @utopian-io will use to upvote a contribution. Unless.... the score's too low, then alas, not an upvote.
Did this help you? ;-)
The hardest time in life is the begining of success. Utopian will come back stronger
We sure will. Thank you for your support :D
I knew utopian will bounce back. Long may your coming back leave utopian
The problem I will show is that it has been shown before How do i find that. @javalord
you will need to check the project repository on github
The problem I will show is that it has been shown before How do i find that.
Excellen click
Oh big thanks to utopian for this great opportunity to continue contributing to open-source, we really appreciate your hard work.
Thanks @olamatto. Appreciate it. Coffee all around ;)
Did someone say coffee?
I heard it too! Ooh look at my desk! It's right there already!
BTW, did I tell you already I LOVE your new avatar? It's EPIC!
Except it's not new at all.
Great video!
Thanks @scipio :) Next will include more Iron Man ;)
I just thought of one thing though: the video does not tell where to include the GitHub repo link you're referring to! I assume it's mentioned in each category template? But it might be an idea to add another paragraph about it to the above article! ;-)
Good question @scipio. In the video I say to include the Github repo link "... at the top of your post." Also in the Rule and Guidelines we have:
Also in each Category Template.
Thanks @scipio. It is important that contributors not forgot this important piece of info in their submissions.
I think I need to stop watching multiple videos at the same time and put my audio back on! :P
Thanks for all the hardworks. Still waiting my last contribution to be reviewed by the graphic mods.
All contributions will definitely be reviewed before it pays out. Your patience is highly needed here :)
Awesome!
Patience has always been a virtue!
Awesome!! The utopian.io is really getting bigger and wider! I really like the idea od ideal. Thanks :)
And thank you too for believing in us :)
Saya suka itu
I guess it will be better if you let us know
While our moderators are still incentivized to leave appropriate comments with solid feedback, this will no longer be mandatory.
This is to reduce the amount of harassment our moderators receive for rejecting the worst of the worst contributions, but also so they don't have to spend their valuable time responding to an user that will reapply for an another review on his every contribution regardless of the feedback.
If your contribution was barely too bad to be voted, a moderator will almost surely leave a message to inform you why it didn't make the cut. If your contribution was good enough to be voted but could still use improvement, a comment is likely to appear as well.
If the policy is to address a specific problem it should be tailored to that situation, not a blanket change in the expectation that affects everyone. For example:
Moderators will reject without comment submissions from anyone who has been warned twice for flagrant rule breaking or harassing the moderation team.
The above creates no ambiguity for rule-abiding users while addressing the problem. It is transparent and achieves the same end in about the same amount effort. Everyone knows what's expected of them, including moderators.
@ewuoso 's suggestion of providing a bot or shared account to anonymize rejections is also a good one.
Moreover, for the rewards/curation platform to be decentralized moderators should not be rejecting borderline cases that one moderator sees as "barely too bad to be voted." Moderators have been centrally assigned an overriding amount of influence. The rewards are only decentralized if they use this influence with extreme restraint.
Thank you for extensive feedback. As @elear has already pointed out, we'll make this a bit more clear and encourage our moderators to leave solid feedback every time.
We want to move away from "accepted", "rejected" and the scoring process in these comments, but we want to make sure they contain reasonable and detailed feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the contribution.
These comments are going to act as a guidance to improve yourself and the contribution (which could also lead to identifying scoring mistakes), rather than as an information of "Will I get paid?" which is not something we stand for.
Thank you for looking out for us. You just changed Utopian for better!
I understand that. I dont have any issue with a moderator rejecting my post. I tell that the sensible moderators i chat with. Ill rather ask how to improve. I know some others get angry when posts are being rejected but thats not me.
I suggest a bot leaves a comment accepted/rejected so the contributor will not know who rejected or approved. This will stop harassment on mods...
My 50 cents
Absolutely. We appreciate your feedback.
If you do want to ask for feedback if no one left any, feel free to contact us on Discord so we or other users can let you know where they see room for improvement.
Also, feel free to use https://review.utopian.io/ to see, more or less, how your post will score.
Long live utopian.io
Thanks for the support @lincom
Utopian rocks! no one can stop this moving train
Thanks @hamzeto. All aboard!
Thank you so much for this great work, it was a fast action, long live utopian.io, looking forward to contribute again.
Thank you for your support :)
That's great , utopian the great platform on steem blockchain.
And thanks to utopian for start again open source contribution.
go ahead utopian
Thank you for your support!
agree with u... its a nice post... every points u say is right.. thanks for shareing...
awesome. Glad to see it is full steem ahead :-)
looking forward to submitting my next post
Wonderfull post
Good work sir @utopian-io That's a good set of solutions given current difficulties and a generous offer for contributors. Thank you!
This new way is clear but the former way ways better in my opinion, hope it the issue with the former way is resolved quickly.