Hey NEAR team, hope you’re all doing well 
So because of our growth of activity within the NEAR ecosystem, @mecsbecs suggested I make a summary of our different projects to make sure it’s all clear for all those in the ecosystem.
I’ve used a template from the creatives DAO for each project summary in the hope it can be as clear as possible for you all, let me know if you have any questions 
Overall I agree with all the projects going on It’s very important to give regular updates, the city node, hack node and arroz criativo have a monthly reporting system coming into force in the next weeks / month. If you have any more guidance on where you’d like this summary to be reported please ping me!
Project Name: Lisbon City Node
Project Status: Starting Out
Project Accounting: No accounting submitted yet, proposal for work carried out in August to follow later this week.
Highlights:
In August we (officially) got the green light to go ahead with this project, @TRosario @halisonlp ave been working on it full time, and me - part-time, we’ve got lots of ideas and are excited to keep developing it
The city node project was developed from a request from the NEAR team to start to represent NEAR across Lisbon. We assembled a small team to do this (currently 4 /5 people) and began planning in mid-July. The current idea is that the Lisbon city node will be a DAO which will service the wider population of Lisbon across all sectors.
So far we’ve received 3 - 4 organisations that are interested, 1 has already made a DAO and begun planning in the ecosystem. The others we’re still in early talks with.
Learnings: Make sure to be clear on the communication the differences between the city node and arroz criativo projects
Next Steps:
- 2nd Strategy meeting next week in which we’re going to present our proposed direction to the council members, take feedback and come up with finalised strategy for the next months
- Submit funding proposal including new equipment for Halison & Tiago
- Legal meeting planned for Friday with NEAR legal to talk about legal set-up of the city node and information we can give to people coming into the ecosystem
For full transparency: one thing it feels important to clear up is the difference between the catchment of the city node and Arroz Criativo projects, so to be 100% clear at this moment we’re considering Arroz Criativo to be the main on-chain representation of our association and it’s where we foster projects and ideas from our existing community and creatives that approach our association. The city node is a much larger scope project where we are representing NEAR across Lisbon to other individuals and organisations on a city-wide scale.
Project Name: Arroz Criativo Guild & DAO
Project Status: Ongoing
Project Accounting: Link to reporting here
Highlights:
Great progress in Arroz criativo. We held 2 interactive workshops, and 4 onboarding events. We planned collaborations with the Graffiti DAO and many of our community.
While this project is moving along very nicely, it’s been slowed by 3 of the team / regular collaborators leaving this month. We’re recruiting part-time and full-time staff to replace them which we will give updates on as they join.
So far @Mette has joined the council but it’s thought that she will not be working on the community management team. @tolga will be taking over the community management for a 1 month period while we stabilise.
Learnings: Keep on moving on 
Next Steps: Submitting budget for September and hiring & training new team members
Project Name: Lisbon Hacknode
Project Status: Active!
Project reporting: link here, accounting to follow.
Highlights:
Last week we launched the hacknode with presentations from Vandal and myself. We had about 15 attendants, 4 new to NEAR and the rest from our community. Tiago has been preparing a program for the whole event and we have another 4 / 5 more event days with talks planned.
The preparation was a little hectic due to the late nature of the proposal and that it’s the first time any of us have been involved with hackathons but we’re very happy with the results and are excited to continue.
One area we need support on is having a physical technical person available to help, we have met one person that could work at the launch but are actively looking for support in that area.
Project Name: Creating a Inter-Generational Creative Hub in a Rapidly Gentrifying World
Project Status: Active
For those that don’t know, this has been a major project of ours for the past 18 months and is one of the core drivers for us bringing our association through to Web3.0.
Creating a solid base (in the form of a permanent location) for our association and community has also been my main priority for the past year and if / when it becomes a reality, I think i’m going to be able to write a book with all the trials and tribulations we’ve been through on this journey!
To do this we have approached various different Web3 organisations & protocols, and in doing so last month I was introduced to Josh from the grants team by a mutual colleague & friend, we talked about this proposal, our current involvement with the NEAR ecosystem and agreed to test the relationship in the next months, potentially at NEARCON
In terms of project development, at this stage we’re continuing our plight on two major threads:
- Continuing to engage property agents to find a suitable location
- Engaging the Camra (Lisbon city council), to establish if our current site is eligible for the long term license required
The intention is to acquire the real estate to house the hub, this would then be controlled by a DAO structure.
Finding eligible locations is proving difficult in Lisbon due to the rapid development which frustratingly leaves many buildings derelict as their investor owners wait for their value to increase. To give a sense of depth of this project, for the past 18 month we’ve been liaising with the Lisbon culture department, the Port company that own all of the river bank in the metropolitan area of Lisbon, the biggest public private real estate organisation in portugal, development department of Almada & several independent realtors.
We’ve had a projects approved by Lisbon funding for a building but have been told by the Patrimony department there are no buildings available and we’ve also had a concept project approved by the largest tech & creative development in Portugal but were not able to find the investment at that time (link to, now 1 yer old, project here: https://bit.ly/ArzHcr2020)
Is it possible? I believe it is
Project Name: NEARCON
Project Status: Ideation
After some talks with Rebecca and the wider ecosystem we had a meeting with Yadira and team on the NEARCON event. We’re excited to be involved wherever the team see it fit for us to contribute
Project Name: Planting AIR
This is the first project we applied to the NEAR ecosystem with and the one we’re definitely most proud of. We’re very grateful to the NEAR team for supporting us to develop the charitable arm of our association and are excited to continue with the project.
Project Status:
Part 1 - Active! We are now into the final month of the first part program with our final 2 residents David and Everton
Part 2 - Starting out. Part 2 is moving to a place where we’ll further establish a DAO specifically to support creatives from lesser educational backgrounds. The DAO has been created, council recruited and budget partially created to continue the project into September
Hope this helps team and I said, don’t hesitate to ping me with any questions
Thanks as always
. From the first proposal months ago to ALL of this. Great to see it all laid out; the work Arroz Criativo is doing is definitely being felt throughout the NEAR community. Excited for that to continue 
.
and thanks for the info