Official Launch of the #ivoted initiative

Official Launch of the #ivoted initiative and @ivoted bot

We're officially lauching the #ivoted initiative and at the same time the @ivoted bot. This post will describe in details the program and the workings of the bot.

As a lot of things concerning the program's objectives have already been explained in this post, here we will focus on these points:

1. Subscription to the program,
2. Functioning of the bot,
3. Other features.

For the Governance and Policy Rules of the account, please refer to this post.

Subscription to the program

To make a compromise between interaction and automation, the way for entering the program has been determined as such:

• You need to post an article with the #ivoted tag,
• Or comment anywhere on Steemit, and within that comment there must be the #ivoted tag or a mention to the @ivoted account,

And that's all, the bot will do the rest. If you're posting a dedicated article, it must be about your choices for witnesses. If you're commenting, it must not be spam and be a relevant comment about the initiative.

You can make a post about the witness system, about the role of witnesses in the Steem network, or promoting one (or several) witness(es) in particular, explaining why you voted for him (them).

To prevent abuse, we will review some posts and comments, and if they don't comply with these rules, the subscription will be cancelled. We will procede by drawing a random sample in all the posts and comments used for subscribing.

Delegation

People can contribute to the project by delegating Steem Power. Thus, we will have a stronger vote, and the bot will be able to vote more often, with a higher value and for more people.

Witnesses who delegate might gain extra visibility (mentions, interviews...), not regarding to the amount they delegated.

Functioning of the bot

The bot has different features that we will explain here.
A more technical post will be done for our submission to #utopian-io.
The bot has been thouroughly tested but it's always possible some bugs haven't been encountered hence not fixed. In the first few days, we will monitor it with attention to make sure it runs smoothly.

Scanning the Blockchain

The bot will be analysing every block looking for people subscribing to the program. Some redundancies have been put in place to make sure it doesn't miss a single block. When encountering a post with the #ivoted tag or a @ivoted mention, if the author is not already in our database, he will be added.

Upvoting

The bot will then upvote all participants one by one (by the order of arrival / subscription) and weekly.

The weight of upvote a post receives is determined as such:

BaseUnit = 7368 (7 days, 10 votes daily, at a minimum of 95 % voting strength) / Total Witness Votes of all participants
UpvoteStrength = BaseUnit * Witness Votes for the account (or Witness Votes of the Proxy if proxied)

This calculation derives from our Policy.

We chose to do a weekly upvote for having less problems with the minimum upvote weight, but this may be subject to changes if we have too much participants or not enough Steem Power (or the opposite that could allow us to upvote on a daily basis).
A security for the Voting Power to always stay above 95 % is also in place, so everybody will receive its upvote with the (almost) highest value possible.

For the choice of the post that will be upvoted :

1. The most recent post in the last seven days,
2. If there is none, then the last comment in the last seven days,
3. And if there's none of those, the upvote strength unusued will be put into a pool and later casted on the bot's post to fuel its Steem Power's growth.

Miscellaneous

1. The bot updates the witness votes of all participants once every hour, hence the weight of upvote members will receive can be subject to variation.
2. The bot will generate once a day a statistics post (midnight to midnight UTC), that we will then comment and analyse before publishing it.
3. The upvote strength not distributed (unusued) during the last day will be used to upvote the precedent daily statistics post, as stated before and in our Policy.
4. The bot will begin upvoting when there is at least 2500 cumulated witness votes between all the participants, to avoid upvoting the first participants with too much voting power, compromising the upvotes for later subscribers.

Other Features

Manual checks

Everyday, a minimum of 10 accounts participating will be randomly chosen for a manual verification. If the account seems to be a bot, we will engage via memo the owner of the account. In the absence of response or if it can't convince us that it is a "human" account, its subscription will be cancelled. The results of these manual checks will be displayed in the daily statistics post for transparency.

Open-sourcing the bot

The bot will be open-source and submitted to #utopian-io. It won't be instantly after its launch because we need some time to prepare the contribution.<

Thanks to the first delegators and supporters

A special thanks to @helo, a witness who delegated to us at the very beginning of the project.
A big thank you to @abh12345, who helped us with his constructive criticism. His opinion was precious to us.
And a general thank you to all people that commented our posts, who came to speak with us on Discord, allowing us to better ourselves.