Greeting NEAR hogs and HODLers!
We humbly present our request for an additional fund to support the work of three translators who have agreed to translate our memes into two NEW languages, Nigerian Pigdin English and Spanish 
We posted a detailed proposal for expanding the guild and growing our audience in this previous forum post:
The 3 New Roles
Right now, the average wage for translation workers is about 20 dollars an hour. Using this as our metric, as well as the amount of work they have committed to and our own experience with the time spent on content creation and social media marketing, we would like to request monthly salaries for these individuals as follows:
Andrew @andrewmamus - Translating 60-70 memes (our monthly meme output) to Pigdin English using the raw files from the English versions we make, and posting them on the NEAR Nigeria Twitter account.
Total hours per month: 40 hours
Salary: 40 x 20 = $800/7.14 = 112 NEAR (subject to change, this is calculated at itâs current price)
Ayerton @aklassen - Translating 30-40 memes (half of our monthly meme output) to Spanish using the raw files from the English versions we make.
Total hours per month: 30 hours
Salary: 30 x 20 = $600/7.14 = 84 NEAR (subject to change, this is calculated at itâs current price)
Miguel @Portes - Translating 30-40 memes (half of our monthly meme output) to Spanish using the raw files from the English versions we make and sharing them on his NEAR Dominicana Instagram account.
Total hours per month: 34 hours
Salary: 30 x 20 = $680/7.14 = 95 NEAR (subject to change, this is calculated at itâs current price)
We would like to request that no matter what the price of NEAR is at the time of payout, that it be calculated in USD so that their fund remains the same every month.
Mission
Some excerpts from our project proposal (full version linked above):
âFor the past month and a half, one of our main focuses within the guild has been to expand our reach to new audiences and horizons. Because we are a meme guild, we have been using our memes not only to promote projects, updates, and various aspects of NEAR and the surrounding community, but we have also set our sights on bringing new people into the fold who may have never heard about NEAR or donât know much about the ecosystem. You can read more about these efforts in our end-of-month post for August, where we detail the different tactics we used to grow our audience and the ecosystem as a whole.â
"Last month, we put out about 70 English memes total. Andrew Mamus stated he would be willing to translate any and all memes for us every month, and @aklassen and @Portes agreed to splitting the monthly content between them to translate. If these three individuals join us, we would be able to publish (give or take) 70 memes a month in English, in Spanish, and in Nigerian Pigdin English, in addition to Swine Guild Russia putting out 40 of their own original NEAR memes in Russian every month. We hope to increase this and create even more content as we take on new projects and audiences.
This would be a long term addition to Swine Guildâs efforts, as we want to establish our role in the community as the meme hub and essentially the comedy central of NEAR Protocolâs Ecosystem. These three members are both interested in this kind of long term growth and have pretty deep roots in the NEAR community, and we would want to bring them on for at least the next 6 months and see where this new growth takes us from there, as long as they keep their end of the bargain with the content agreement. It is clear through their enthusiasm that they have this growth mindset when it comes to marketing and using NEAR, and are taking that even further by using their language skills to help us market NEAR and all of itâs wonderful attributes, and have a lot of fun doing it.
We are overjoyed to have community members who are so willing to translate our content because not only does it help bring NEAR content to a more diverse group of people, but I also feel that these efforts are in line with NEARâs goal to enable community-driven innovation to benefit people around the world. The words âopen and user-friendlyâ appear over and over in most peopleâs general description of what makes NEAR unique, and I believe this applies to both the development side of the protocol AND the essence of the overall community.
Memes are internet artifacts with the ability to transcend to new areas of knowledge, create nuanced conversations, and bring awareness to anything using images, text, and humor. The nature of memes is that they are a form of communication that begs to be widely shared, and that is what we hope to do by expanding our reach and with that, the global NEAR community as a whole."
Thank you for allowing us the time and space to grow and be ourselves in this community. We are loving every second of it and we canât wait to share it with more people all over the world.
Stay Boarish,
Coyote
