[Announcement] Arroz Criativo Council Changes & Updates

[StevenR]

Hey NEAR team, hope you’re all doing well

Just posting an update on here after some changes to our DAO & guild team recently.

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Council Changes
So Tolga has decided to leave his role so we are currently looking for a new community manager and council member.

In doing so we’ve got interviews this week and next week as we’re trying to find someone that can be present physically to run the workshops & onboarding every Wednesday.

In the meantime both @roadworks (actually an original and existing Arroz board member) and myself are going to jump into the council as urgent replacements. Going forward the plan is that when we find the new community manager, I will step down to leave the other 3 to run the DAO.

Mette has also indicated she would live to step down in the coming months, so we’ll be looking for another person in that time.

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Updates
Some updates and some KR’s below, for general ecosystem viewing

• Our project with Kid Acne is all but complete, NFTs have been distributed through his Insta to people who made NEAR wallets…

link: Login • Instagram

Original proposal:

[Approved] 35m long wall mural & NFTs (Arroz Criativo & Graffiti DAO collaboration)

We are inviting an established British graffiti artist to come to the studios in Lisbon to paint the outside wall of our compound. The artist’s name is Kid Acne, first name Ed. Ed is a UK-based artist, illustrator, print-maker and hip-hop artist that’s been painting large scale murals for over 20 years including hosting his own graffiti festival in the north of England called feature walls, links below: Website: https://www.kidacne.com/ Insta: Login • Instagram Feature Walls: FEATURE WALLS -…

• Planting AIR 2.0 has started - we’re all very happy to be working on this and are running workshops once every two weeks for the residents
  Planting A.I.R Open Call - Arroz Estúdios

• We’re also running a weekly crypto meet-up in the studios hosted by a mixture of people. We’re looking for more presenters so please reach out if you want to give a talk there
  link here: Lisbon Crypto Meetup Group (Lisbon, Portugal) | Meetup

• In the past year we’ve progressed to a stage where have now offered our full time staff contracts giving them more stability and access to subsidies during lockdowns

• Our events calendar has bounced back to 4/5 events per week after the December / January lockdowns

• We’ve started a project with Minting music (and Mintbase) to move our membership system over to NFTs which will onboard over 10k people onto the NEAR ecosystem this year alone (we’re currently averaging around 500 per week, in 2021 we had around 11k)

• We received funding from the Portuguese national culture fund, DGArtes, for the next Rare Effect Event

• We’re currently ironing out the details to take Rare Effect to one of the biggest festivals in Europe (watch this space!!!)

I’m sure i’ve missed a lot a lot off here, but hopefully will have time to keep sending these kind of updates

Hope you’re all good and have a great weekend

[Mette]

Just a note to confirm this update: We will be setting up the new temporary council and once the community manager is in place and ready to go - asap - @StevenR will step down to focus on the day to day at Arroz Estudios again.
We look forward to welcoming @roadworks !

I will aim to step down by start May, allowing for a 2 month period of transition. In the run up to getting the new community manager in place, I hope that the community can understand that things are less efficient than they have been under the guidance and hard work of @squattingPigeon .

I and everyone else whom he encouraged and supported in learning the ways around NEAR are grateful for the many hours he put in, and I know that he has set many more seeds than what has currently come to fruition.

Similar to the project update above we will start presenting a weekly glimpse of the on-goings at the venue and studios, to illustrate both the very physical maker mentality and the in-person collaborative and social space that it houses. So the NEAR community can gain some understanding about how the Arroz community works and plays, and what opportunities are to be found here.