I want to share my thoughts about how we can use undoubtedly hottest media platform for something unusual at first look.
Open source business model if this term is suitable to be mentioned alongside is the hard way to go. Projects suffer from lack of funding, it's good when it's free but it's near impossible to beat well-funded competitors if you are not at least backed by a company. There are exceptions indeed but just exception from a common trend line.
I wrote a post about one of my pet projects recently and idea was born instantly. This is more about the process. If there is a roadmap, weekly or monthly progress reports, development team is indeed will release such reports on various media platforms, write fine manuals, sharing success stories all the way.
So why not use Steemit as a primary media platform for such issues? It's even possible to use Steemit awesome voting mechanism as an index of how recently announced changeset or roadmap welcome by your users. Everyone can benefit from it.
Benefits for The Project
It is pretty obvious that it's steemulation by magic internet money. Crystal clear response from end users. Better vision of what has higher priority. Also helps to attract a wide audience attention.
Benefits for End-Users
That's all about communication: people vote, team eventually deliver. Stupid simple and highly efficient. No need to spend money, if you like it, you automatically support it.
Benefits for Steemit
This is how Steemit create more value. It turns it into much more than social blogging platform because capabilities of a system with thousands of connected people with economic built-in are almost boundless.
Perhaps model works for a limited amount of projects, one type of projects I clearly see here is a legit cryptocurrencies not backed by foundations or ICO because anyway for now most of the crowd here is in one way or another crypto area related. AMA threads, weekly updates and announcements are definitely belong here.
This is absolutely one of the things people are using it for. Look at the front page right now:
#1 New App to Secure Your Steem Account
#2 When do whales upvote? (includes open source tool that analyzes voting)
#3 Steemtools.com registered over 50 third party tools for Steemit as of today. + updates
#4 steem.ws - The public steem api cluster
In the past a post blogging about finding and reporting a security bug got votes and earned good rewards, along with proposals, update releases, etc.
Of course that is not always dominating the front page. Sometimes there are Playboy playmates.
I tried to find such posts and barely noticed a couple announcements. Content sinks in "growing pains".