This is my first official update as a witness for Steem. I will be rolling these out regularly to inform people who have voted for me on the progress of everything I have proposed to do.

Firstly, I am absolutely ecstatic that I have achieved the rank of 89 in my first week as witness!!! A very big thank you to anybody who has voted for me so far. I hope this growth continues so I can pursue all the plans mentioned in my original application.

If you would like to vote for me as a witness please do so using the instruction at the bottom of this post.

Summary of Activity

Upgrading memory on witness server
Working on a way to report funds spent monthly
New flyer design for promo-uk
Working on team management and processes for @steemsports
Supporting new witnesses in #witness channel in Steemit chat
Delegating any unused Steem Power to @minnowbooster

My witness node seems to be running well. With my current rank I have managed to generate blocks easily without any missed so far.

Detailed Activity

Witness Server Upgraded (Already!!)

I originally launched my witness node with 10GB of RAM and at that point with the growth of STEEM I immediately debated whether this was enough.

I received a comment regarding it in my actual witness application and following that I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to at least future proof the node to a degree.

I will leave this as it is for now, let the node deal with a few blocks and then monitor memory usage to see exactly how it is holding up.

It has resulted in more server costs up front for me, however, I am happy to do this now for the sake of running a quality node.

More Detailed Marketing Fund Reports

I am still a long way off from returning any funds to use for my marketing plans, however I have received feedback from @starkerz that I should provide and offer a more detailed plan on what I intend to do with the funds I earn from my witness node.

I have looked in detail on how I could do this and unfortunately it is quite difficult to calculate exactly how much I could potentially return from the node at a certain rank. There is currently no accurate way to see how much is earnt per block (that I am aware of). All I have currently worked out so far is that it is around 0.8 Steem currently and reduces as you generate more blocks. Everybody can see how many blocks I have generated so far here https://steemdb.com/@adamm/blocks. This should for the short term provide transparency on what has been earnt and what it will be allocated to.

For the time being, what I will do once the server costs are covered will be to report monthly on the amount of blocks covered, which will give me a rough costing of what Steem Power has returned. Whilst the costs are manageable I will be paying the initial expenses out of my own pocket until it is at a point where I will need to do a weekly power down and use the funds in that manner.

This method will allow me to produce monthly reports and it will provide transparency on what is being spent and what results it will be providing.

Promo-uk New Flyer

As part of the marketing work I proposed I am already working on a few activities.

As I said, my witness node is not yet earning enough to cover costs, however I am very grateful for the returns I received on my actual witness application article. I am using this as payment to redesign the #promo-uk flyer that is distributes in all major cities in the UK.

Promo-uk has already printed 35,000 flyers and they are going all over the country to the team members to be distributed. There is demand for more as we get more people interested in helping and after speaking with @stephenkendal we have agreed it is time to do an overhaul of the flyer to maximise engagement and signups from the efforts put in.

The flyer will be finished by my designer in around 2 days and I will be posting the design out for public feedback.

Promo-uk Update

For everybody interested, #promo-uk is growing rapidly now and we are actively distributing print media and material to 10 major cities:

Manchester
Warwick
Nottingham
Sheffield
Lancaster
Cambridge
Birmingham
Wolverhampton
Bristol
Portsmouth

Full details here https://steemit.com/promo-uk/@stephenkendal/promo-uk-as-the-team-slowly-begins-to-fill-the-map-with-flags-i-want-more-many-many-many-more-to-join-the-team

Steem Sports Marketing

As per my witness application I am supporting Steem Sports with their marketing as we work on launching the new website. Things are progressing very well over at the Steem Sports Discord chat. @thecryptodrive has been on a mission to build a strong team and because of that we have just decided on a task management system to move forward with, which is Asana. From this point onwards it will be much easier to coordinate all marketing, development and editorial work and I will be able to include its progress in further updates.

There is a post going out shortly to announce the team and the upcoming plans so keep an eye out for that.

Supporting New Witnesses

This wasn’t something mentioned in my original plan, but I have had a few people contact me on Steemit.chat about assistance with setting up their own witness node.

I have been helping a few people get the node up and running and answering any questions they may have. There is a lot that isn’t documented when setting up a node and I have already done a lot of digging to find the right guides for helping people setup, so I am more than happy to share what I know.

I am by no means an experienced Steem witness, however hopefully I can help the witness community and the #witness channel in steemit.chat by supporting people who ask questions there.

Delegating to Minnowbooster

A new project that has come to my attention this week is one that @reggaemuffin has been working hard on. @minnowbooster is a fantastic new project for any new people starting on Steem.

It essentially lets people purchase delegated Steem Power for a set period of time in which they can use that to support the Steemit platform, use it to gain their own following quickly and then continue from there. It is a perfect, risk free way to offer support to new people on Steemit.

I am delegating some of my Steem Power directly to the @minnowbooster bot. I have another account not being used @ceronza that has around 1300 SP. This was being powered down and transferred to my @adamm account, however the entire amount in ceronza will be provided to anybody within the @minnowbooster account.

So, if you are looking for delegated Steem Power or already have an order in Minnowbooster. Let me know and I can either take the order if I have it available or I can walk you through on how to get set up on the minnowbooster account.

Thanks

This concludes all updates so far as my first week being a witness. Again a big thanks to everybody who has voted for me so far including @thecryptodrive (great to work with you on the Steem Sports team),@stephenkendal (great to be working with you on promo-uk), @oceancoinz (pleased to hear your node is up and running now), @timcliff (thank you for including me in your witess weekly overview), @jerrybanfield (thanks and keep up the crazy growth you are doing for Steemit), @samupaha (thankyou for asking support to help the tothemillion campaign), @theprophet0 (thanks and a pleasure working with you on steem sports) and many many more. Sorry I cannot list you all, you are all equally important for my plans but I don’t want to turn this post into an "include everybody" spam post :).

I will continue to work hard to help support Steem, I will work even harder to ensure my knowledge is up to date to keep the node running perfectly.

As always, if you would like to support what I am doing please consider voting for me as a witness. To vote, please use the instructions below.

Because I am currently outside of the top 50 witnesses, please vote for me in the following way:

Go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Scroll down to the bottom of the page until you see this text and box.
Please type in “adamm” and click “VOTE”.