Image from SteemDB another great tool from @jesta

I’m just looking at my first proper month of Steemit payments – it took me about a month to get used to the place and to get a feel for what works best (just a feel mind you, it’s still emerging). It also took time to gain some influence and get known by a few people. The #openmic community, coralled by @luzcypher and @pfunk did a lot to help me get more of an audience and encourage me to keep trying different stuff. I’m also beginning to build relationships with the artist/collaboration community especially since @merej99 inspired the saga Ballad of Ned’s Head.

The thing about Steem-based currency is that it feels like Monopoly money when you’re giving it away but it feels like real money when you receive it.

I’ve been blogging for a long time now (about fifteen years since I first typed shit in a text box and pressed “post”) and I’ve grown up with the idea that you make money “because of” blogging not directly through it. Well that’s changed with Steemit – I expect to still derive some income and other benefits “because of” Steemit but I’m also drawing down actual pounds sterling that my wife recognises as real income.

I drew down £79.32 during the month of October. Now if someone had said to me “Dear Lloyd, we love your blogging so much that we’d like you to write for us a couple of times a day, about whatever you feel like and we’ll pay you £80 a month after the first month.” I’d have a pretty short, concise and potentially offensive answer ready for them. But because I’ve chosen to do it myself and I don’t feel like I’m beholden to anybody, and because I’ve always been told “because of” not “for” I’m over the moon that I’m seeing shekels pop up in my bank account.

For those not familiar with the process, you get paid within 24-36 hours of posting and the amount depends on lots of things but mostly the number of votes you get, the influence of those voting for you, and what other good content is getting paid out on in the same period (I don’t know how much this last one affects things, I guess it must, but I haven’t seen any analysis). Anyway this isn’t an Amazon or YouTube “oh you get paid after one month of sales and only if you exceed a total of £x” – it’s actual monopoly money even in small amounts.

One of the downsides is that the whole system is complex and it keeps changing (yes that’s two downsides but they go together nicely) – so for example, for a while we were getting paid in a mix of tokens – Steem and Steem-backed Dollars (SBD) (which are liquid) and Steem Power (SP) which can only be “powered down” over two years. Then the SBD supply dried up and now we just see Steem and SP and it’s unpredictable how much you’re going to see until the moment you get paid (you can make a good estimate, but rarely spot on). So then to turn your Steem into Pounds you will have to go through a third currency (probably bitcoin) and the rates of Steem/BTC and BTC/£ can fluctuate quite a lot. Also all prices on the site and supporting sites in the ecosystem (e.g. steemstats by @jesta) are in US$ so you have to bear in mind the USD/GBP volatility too (thanks Brexit!). But mostly I ignore all this mental arithmetic nonsense and get on with writing and playing.

I do acknowledge that I’m privileged – I had a good, British education. I’m a native English speaker and writer with years of experience of crafting words both online and off- I also don’t have a day job, by which I mean I don’t have to be somewhere chained to a desk from 9am to 5pm with someone watching my every move. And I’ve been practicing my ukulele and singing for many years.

Nonetheless it’s got me going. I’ve written three songs in the last few weeks, two of which have been sitting in notebooks for years not ever quite emerging. I’ve had lots of fun playing for people and I’ve made some new pals. That’s the thing that continues no matter whether this whole thing is still here next week, the relationships we build can be transferred over into other places, the community exists regardless. My goal for the next couple of months is to pull some of the people whose work and company I’ve enjoyed in previous online communities in here to get them doing cool stuff and getting paid for it too. If you know me from somewhere else and you’re interested let me know before I start pestering you myself.

You can sign up for Steemit here and you’ll get a small amount of Steem Power to get you going.

And you can read this post there too.

As a person who enjoys programming and programming culture (I can’t call myself a programmer anymore) I love github. It’s amazing to me that open source software has taken such a hold on imaginations that there’s this open versioning system that allows you not only to read other people’s code but to report issues, suggest amendments and even re-use the code or start a whole new project based on it (subject to the licensing terms of course).

I’ve been ruminating for a while on hacking this infrastructure to allow creative collaboration on materials other than code. What would it look like if the end product of a project weren’t a program or a web app but a book or a movie? How could you get people working on books and movies in the same way as people work on open-source software? And if you couldn’t, I mean if it just wouldn’t work, then why would that be? What is so different about the movie or book product that makes it incompatible with the git/github environment? Are there better environments, ie more suitable to traditional writing or film-making? Or is there a new kind of book/movie/story/whatever that is enabled by this sort of collaborative environment? Who else has done anything about this already? And my standard question at the start of all projects “Why is what I’m suggesting dangerously wrong and how are you going to stop me?”

I’ve started working on a few projects to open these questions up. Two of them are my travels across the USA – Tuttle2Texas took place in March 2010 and consisted of a few Tuttlers travelling by rail from Boston to Austin and I then went on to Los Angeles. Please Look After This Englishman (PLATE) happened a year later and was me travelling through my online social network without much of a plan except to arrive in San Francisco on March 1st and leave from NYC on March 30th. Both projects were heavily blogged and tweeted, there are photos galore on Flickr and some bits of video that I shot. I wrote a summary of the first trip in daily instalments (I’ve had a go at doing it here too, but it doesn’t inspire me so much) and I made a one-man show out of the second trip and an e-book out of the blog. I probably have notes and artefacts from both trips hanging around in archive boxes or plastic bags in someone’s garage or something. I’m also starting a new project – Wood Lane with a series of video clips and some writing. This differs from the others in that it’s been conceived from the start as something that would live and evolve on github from the start.

I’m looking at what products I might make out of the material. You might look at that too – what could you do yourself or how could you help shape what I’m doing? People like products, packages, ways of bundling things together in ways that make them look like other things. But you might have an idea for something else.

These are the aspects of github that I think could be useful to us as potential collaborators (there may be more):

Issues

This, for me, is the place to discuss what’s wrong with the products so far. Anyone can raise an issue and anyone can act on them. You’ll see that on the PLATE repo I’ve raised a few issues as “enhancements” ie suggestions for the next version. Other issue labels are “bug”, “question” and “help wanted” I’d love you to raise issues.

Pull Requests

What does this mean in the context of a non-code-based project? I think it means you’ve come up with something that you think should be integrated into the core project. A pull request gives us an opportunity to discuss that and decide whether that’s something I want to do as the core artist or whether you should fork and create your own.

Fork

A fork might come up because we decide to as a result of a pull request, but you might also just want to use my material as a jumping off point for your own version. Or to incorporate some of the material into another project. I’d see that as a fork – it’s a way of keeping track of what derivative works there may be.

Wiki

I wrote a home wiki page for PLATE and then forgot about it! I suppose wiki pages could be anything – profiles of contributors, ideas for new ways of interpreting the material, just a collaborative writing space that’s directly linked to the code and the rest of the project, a project blog – all of these, you’re welcome to try new stuff!

Dive in and get involved

Don’t let ignorance of git or github (or of anything really) stand in your way. If you’re interested we can overcome all that. Let’s see if we can create something interesting together.

So yeah, if you have any questions, do comment here (wherever you find this), but I’d rather you dived in and made a wiki page or raised an issue on the appropriate repository!