The infrastructure

The week has been both productive and useful.

My witness has made it to the 113 position (93 if we see it with @drakos tool for inactive witnesses),

The node made its first block on the 20th and another one yesterday

The server runs smoothly and barely notices steemd is there.

So no missed blocks

The human

• We see that the #castellano tag is flourishing and being adopted, it was a keen surprise to see the @dropahead team is curating that tag and we want to thank them for the support to authors using it.

• With the help of @juliococo in venezuela little by little we are encouraging the adoption of steemit to perform our citizen meetings and popular assemblies.

DSD Venezuela has been busy at work for communities.
And our goal is to achieve sustainability trought steemit.
http://steemit.com/@reveur/actividad-petare-dsd-social-dsdpetare

• Also have been looking on @sircork 's #youarehope project as #venezuela is one of his areas of reach and therefore we would like to be of help.

There seems to be a confusion as whether i am running a curation project.

I have setup tools for #venezuela authors to call a curation team and empower them with the SP i have influence or control, i had authorized 2 accounts for my trail to follow their vote, but they went AWOL.

This ended up in a comments flame war in one of my posts and thus i feel the need to mention it here.

So corrective measures for properly using the SP where taken

Since no one was using the key-phrase to summon the trail i realized it was the wrong approach and decided to put it on hold.

From now on we simply made the trail follow @provenezuela Vote, their white paper is in agreement with my views of how we can build a better world and while no one is curating for me since i spend so much time in the machines room i think my SP is better used there.

The technical

• The two bots for informing about the proper use of tags are ready to go, since yesterday the one for @minnowbooster is running and has had an overall good reception.

• The one for the #steemit Tag we performed a trial run, but apparently the message is not friendly enough we had many replies from users feeling aggressed when this was not the intention. So we put it on hold and we are rethinking the message.

I get the feeling people is weary of bots and have come to dislike them as so far they have been used either for voting, advertising or correction.

I believe that BOTs should be helpful and provide the heavy lifting and remove the repetitive tasks, and in general can be used for good, it is up to the developers to decide their behavior.

• The summoning BOT which was about to be thrown in a drawer might have found a new home helping a dear friend in his project... If this happens he will let you know.

• Also We are redesigning the trail so you dont need to provide your PPK anymore and use steemconnect instead to autorize your participation.
  This removes the headache of having to protect the server to protect the users Posting keys and gives flexibility to users to join or retire from the trail. I want to thank @surpassinggoogle for giving me the idea and @neander-squirrel for helping me with the code.

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