Go Local to Go Big - will this take Steem to the Moon?

Until very recently I knew no one on steemit in real life.

When I started organising the first Wales steemit meetup I discovered how few steemians there are in the whole of Wales.

In a country with a population of 3 million there were only around 70 steemit users identified as being in Wales. Of these only 15 were currently active.

That is an active steemit population density of only 0.0005%.

After making contact with all the active steemians I realised there were none in the same area as me.

I was truly the only steemian in the village...

The obvious answer to this 'dilemma' of course is to recruit more people to steemit in the local area.

I have set about that with alacrity. As part of my #signup100 campaign I have already got 6 more local people on steemit.

In fact now almost half of the active steemians in Wales are in a 30 mile radius in west Wales.

Wales Meetup

By chance because of the wide spread across the country of the active steemians Lampeter in the middle of Wales was chosen for the first Wales steemit meetup on 10 February.

The planned 5 week Introduction to Steemit course will also be held in Lampeter.

So there is something of a steemit hub developing here - heading in the direction of the SteemAcceleratorHub (@stach) in Nigeria.

Once you begin to get significant accumulations of steemians all in one area steemit can begin to take on a whole new purpose.

Local Community Networks

In my past life I established one of the first and one of the largest local community online networks in Britain. At its peak before the arrival of Facebook it had over 300,000 visitors a month.

From that I learnt how powerful local networks could be. Online and offline merged and overlapped. Businesses used the site for advertising jobs, job seekers used the site to find jobs. It was the go-to site for local people to find out what was on at the local cinemas, who their councillors were, or how the local basketball team did in their last game.

Local users demanded local content. Local content attracted local users.

The network grew and grew and grew. It then took on real journalists to write local news.

Local news attracted more local users, and expatriates that wanted to keep in touch with their home city.

The network grew and grew and grew some more. It innovated.

We linked the local football team with its fans around the world live on the web. We live broadcast a major basketball game taking place in the city. We arranged marriages and broadcast weddings - even making it to page 3 of the national Sun newspaper.

The local newspaper, part of one of the major newspaper groups, hated us. We were way ahead of their curve.

They tried to ban us. We poached their journalists.

They tried to buy us. We turned them down.

But I was young, idealistic and naive.

The site did not generate money. This was before the word monetisation had even been invented.

We did it for the thrillz. We did it for the lulz.

Then life changed. Facebook happened. I moved 200 miles away. Interest waned.

They were the best days of our lives.

That was Internet 1.0

I skipped over Internet 2.0. I was busy just making money to catch up.

Now with the Blockchain we have Internet 3.0.

How much better could local community networks be with steem?

Imagine local people being rewarded with steem for generating local content. Businesses earning rewards for posting jobs. Local charities raising funds through posting on the blockchain.

Local content attracts more local users. Local users earn steem to generate more local content.

Rinse and repeat. And multiply by every village, every town, every city across the world.

And every outpost to the moon...

Is this all a fanciful dream? Or could local community networks catapult steem and steemit into the big time?

I would welcome feedback, and a much needed reality check, on this idea.

Please don't do the numbers on this until it has been considered in more depth. They are scary!

I would particularly welcome the thoughts of the likes of @timcliff and @lukestokes who might cast their experienced eyes over the concept, of @transisto who I believe looks keenly for ideas that bring new users to the platform, and of @taskmaster4450 who has future eyes that seem to pinpoint quite clearly where steem could be heading.

This is just my big picture overview of the idea.

If people think it has merit I will expand further with the four stage model I have been developing for taking this forward.

You might also be interested in some of my other posts :

[ image and graphics by @pennsif ]