I really enjoyed last Sunday's Witness Forum, this is just a brief summary and few thoughts.

@aggroed's just posted a recording of the latest witness forum he hosted on Sunday, it was pretty upbeat an interesting as usual...

In attendance were various representatives of Steem Inc and many of the top witnesses. @aggroed did a great job of asking pertinent questions focussing on the basics and keeping everyone on track.

The forum was in roughly two halves - firstly Steem Inc took the floor and then the Witnesses.

Steem Inc Section

Q: What's the state of Steem Inc since Steemfest?

Since the release of betasteemit which has communities as its main feature, the focus of Steem In is now primarily on building strategies for a hard launch, due possibly as early as March 2020. communities.

Communities were (I think this by @roadscape) defined as being like subreddits, or platforms with moderators who have authoritative powers, and so have different features and fuctionalities.

Communities are already pretty popular - 6.9% of post and 12.6% of payouts – done on the beta since Jan 08.

The next phase is to think about marketing and invite systems to really make communities work and @Fredrikaa made a sensible point about getting the mass of steemians involved with the full roll of of communities, which seems like a good idea as apparently there's a very limited budget for marketing in the coming months, so 'we're going to have to get creative'.

Next there was a brief discussion of the importance of giving new users a great (i.e. intuitive) user experience which doesn't initially necessarily expose them to the full complexities of the Steem ecosystem - take @splinterlands as an example - people use it for playing a game, and they're on Steem, but they need to know nothing about Steem to play the game - there was general agreement that more of that sort of thing was needed where communities are concerned.

Q: How do we onboard?

@andarchy and @roadscape were both in agreement that it’s more about a good user experience rather than incentivising with tokens, which if you do too early things get really dark really fast, better to make communities about good social authentic honest interactions!

This led to @themarkymark posting in images of the highest paid posts and comments back in the day.

In case yer interested - TOP POST PAY-OUT= $46K and $2.9K for a comment….those sure as hell were not the days.

SMTs?

There are currently 5-8 people testing SMTs, bug fixing and we're close to a release date (heard that before!)

The SMT Hard Fork could go through before BTC halves, hope, but there are no promises and the main focus is on communities.

Any changes to the Power Down feature will be for later.

Q: Are we set to scale?

We were initially told that we're in a better place than most or all other blockchains.

Then @aggroed asked 'How many more transactions? Can we do more than EOS? How big it can get?'10/100/ 1000 times where we're at

The response to this that there we don't know - there are too many unknowns… too many variables…..

This was a bit disappointing!

WITNESSES SECTION

Q: What do you think needs to get done to bring up the price of steem and what are your priorities?

@acidyo (in text chat) wants easy account creation without making it easy to abuse.

@therealwolf pointed out that important topics are not being discussed on chain, rather in discord, hence he's set up a new community to remedy this.

@Cerventas pointed to the problem with diversity, is it makes it difficult to market – each app is left alone, you can’t market a blockchain, we don’t have a killer dapp. What are going to be the killer applications???

There was some talk in the chat about the importance of getting more people using communities and @howo suggested we need to communities involved with testing -so we know what users want!

@jarvie suggested asking people outside of Steem - The sTEEM COMMunity maybe isn’t the place to ask as we're all converts.

@aggroed finally suggested the need for a centralised market – easy to sell tokens, easy to do business.

Q: What do we need for Steem to grow?

Simplification - as mentioned above, so Steem is more intuitive to use.

Steem maybe needs to be more neutral, and the idea of getting rid of voting for Steem was raised, and in the future simply linking Steem to resource credits which are used to power everything else.

This would mean earning by delegating resource credits for dapps to help users out….something for the next HF maybe?

In relation to this the possibility of being able to =granting resources on demand was raised, so we can get more users….RCs are a pool for all people! AS not everyone is going to be using at the same time.

As the show drew towards the end (as as people ran out of Steem, excuse the pun), there was some chat about changing the names of the witnesses was mentioned - it's cultish, and changing 'Power up' to 'staking'.

Final Thoughts

This was a great show, from the first half it sounds like there's a few developments coming in the short term - hard launch of communities and SMTs this year for sure, and lots of thinking through about what's to come next.

The one takeaway was that if we can all be doing anything then it's to get contributing to the communities so that we've got something to market with in a couple of months time!

I really recommend everyone find the time to listen in on these forums, they are very informative!