[CLOSED] Liverpool NEAR Community Talks Pilot (by JobCrypt Global Blockchain & Web3 Talks)

Marketing DAO Marketing DAO
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Funding scheme:
One-time:

Initiative summary
JobCrypt is a decentralized job board built on EVM technology and IPFS, launched late in ‘22. Our goal is to help bring Web3 ecosystems and companies together with Web3 Talent.

With Web3 being new to the mainstream and marred in a little controversy, we have thus embarked on a series of “talks events” designed to stimulate the growth of local blockchain and Web3 communities. As a Main Street blockchain start-up, our marketing objective on this initiative is to inspire participants into taking up careers and perhaps eventually even launching start-ups in the space.

Having worked with the NEAR Community on other initiatives we would now like to help by giving back to the community through the launch of the Liverpool NEAR Community Talks Pilot, in preparation for a longer running series of NEAR Community talks focused solely on the NEAR native projects.

Pilot Event Structure
Audience
The audience for our event will consist of a manageable 50 to 100 individuals with a curiosity about blockchain and little if any knowledge on NEAR. Our goal is that by the end of the event they will have sufficient knowledge and access to dig deeper into the NEAR protocol and Ecosystem to discover more of the ground breaking initiatives and projects that reside there.

Outreach Approach
Our outreach approach will consist of leveraging new and existing relationships with the local Liverpool learning community sending invitations out early. We will be looking at working with learning institutions, co-working spaces and social media that cater for individuals between the ages of 21 to 35. We will be running a social media campaign online in the run up to the pilot and a further campaign after the event with highlights.

Location
The Liverpool NEAR Community Talks Pilot will take place in the heart of the city of Liverpool making it easy for our participants and speakers to access both locally and internationally.

Event day
We will be working to source speakers to appear in person from exemplary proponents of sustainability, human development and positive social impact within the NEAR ecosystem. Some examples of the candidates under consideration are UNCHAIN Fund assisting with humanitarian aid for Ukrainian emergency relief; Yogain targeting the new merge between health fitness and NFT collectables on the Octopus Network; and the ClimaFi DAO that fully takes global SDG agendas surrounding climate adaptation and brings a carbon credits marketplace onto the blockchain

With three specialized talks from NEAR Ecosystem projects starting from 17.45 and running to 21.00 including scheduled intermissions, we will be featuring key attributes of the NEAR ecosystem and hosting a dedicated panel to answer for relevant Q&As. Our objective will be to increase the broader visibility of NEAR’s true potential beyond its mere tokenomics and preparing communities in Liverpool for incredible employment opportunities.

Expected Impact
The expected impact of the Liverpool NEAR Community Talks Proposal are:

  • The creation of an in person community with which NEAR ecosystem projects can share their latest achievements, services and products demonstrating the utility of the ecosystem beyond tokenomics
  • The fostering of new collaborative and professional relationships between community members and NEAR Ecosystem projects with the aim of stimulating career opportunities and jobs growth in the space
  • The creation of a foundation for future Liverpool NEAR community events, with a view to building a community base of developers, creatives and operations professionals dedicated to the NEAR ecosystem.

As the world moves further away from pandemic times and with the recent headlines surrounding the crypto industry, we feel that the solid, trustworthy, positive In Person engagement is how we will best win the hearts, minds and hands of the new Web3 workforce.

Measures of Success
Our primary measures of success are:

  • Community reach (clicks, views etc)
  • Event sign ups
  • Event Attendance
  • Audience Engagement
  • Post event Social Media commentary

Funding Details:
Our expenses break down into the following categories:

Venue - this includes aspects like, accommodation, projectors, PA systems, food, drink and welcome

Approx budget: $2,403.82 for 50 - 100 people

Media - this includes photography, videography, live social media updates and post-production to create a worthy community resource for onward use

Approx budget: $1,922.72 for 4 hours

Event Day Support - this includes ancillaries like SWAG

Approx budget: $601.15

Total Funding Requested
As part of this grant proposal we are asking for $4929 in NEAR (approx 1948 NEAR)

NEAR Wallet ID
Jobcrypt.near

Wallet Owner
Tony Ushe (cryptotwilight) Founder JobCrypt

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Thank you for your proposal. Could you please fill out the form Form Marketing DAO Proposal Application

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Awesome! Could you please launch your dapp on Aurora? Now I see only Optimism. Thanks!

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Hi @cryptotwilight – thanks for the proposal. I am reviewing and will also review your form submission. In the meantime, I agree with @Dacha that it is important for fund recipients to be active in the NEAR ecosystem. Can you let us know if you plan to launch on Aurora? Thanks!

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Hi @Dacha @so608

Thank you for the feedback. yes we do have a plan to launch on Aurora, it’s part of why we’re engaged in the Liverpool NEAR Community Talks Pilot. With the pilot and subsequent talks series being successful we’ll be able to engage the Aurora Grants and Dev Communities to facilitate a launch on the chain. Our goal is to be shrink wrapped to Aurora leveraging on chain projects, native features, currencies etc, hence deployment is a non-trivial exercise. This NEAR Community work with Liverpool will help us to engage Aurora Ecosystem projects with an onward view of supporting their hiring needs natively.

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Hi @cryptotwilight

Thanks for building out the proposal. This is quite expensive for a single meetup.

Perhaps we can take a look at lowering the budget?

Venue:
This is likely a 2-3 hour event correct?
Are there coworking spaces or local universities to host this in Liverpool?

What is the venue?
The price point is quite high given the circumstances.

Media:
Please elaborate on what you plan to do with the post-production of the media?

  • Videographer - Are you making full-length videos and highlight reels?
  • Photographers - Wouldn’t that just be the same person snapping stills at the event?

Promotion (Prior to the event)
How will this event be promoted to ensure you get 100 attendees?

Event Day Support:
Please outline what swag you want to provide. Shirts?

Please remove - If a staff member falls sick and missing equipment.

Again, I think your budget is quite high given the circumstances.

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Thanks for your proposal.

At this stage I am unable to support this proposal.

I am very excited and would like to work closely on how to develop a long term Regional Strategy for Liverpool. However the price point is very high for the first event. Some thoughts:

  • Meetups are a vital part of every local crypto ecosystem. In the document I’ve shared above, I outline how depending on the stage and maturity of the ecosystem, expansion should be progressive - first host NEAR events through existing Web3 Meetups, then host NEAR specific Meetups, etc.
  • I’ve been attending and organising crypto Meetups since 2017. I know that most of the successful, recurrent ones have zero budget and make use of co-working spaces, university lecture theatres or even bars who are willing to host them for free or at very low cost. Last event I hosted was in Medellin in December 2022 at HashHouse - they hosted me for free, through their existing Meetup we drew an audience of about 50 people, I only paid $400 for pizza and a bar tab (out of my own pocket).
  • Items such as media and swag seem excessive for a local meetup. Simply put, it is unsustainable to host these events worldwide on a consistent basis (like we need them to).

Looking forward to connecting to see how we can craft a regional strategy for Liverpool

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Hi @cryptotwilight thanks for your proposal.

I would echo the comments from fellow council and feel that i am unable to support at this stage. I hope you understand that building regional events and hubs is an important part of the NEAR ecosystem goals. I suggest that you continue to organise smaller events and look at getting involved in the Regional Hubs development.

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Hi @Klint

Thank you for the response, it’s appreciated.

Perhaps we can take a look at lowering the budget?

  • certainly, we have looked into this, and the challenges that arise are with respect to the balance between the number of attendees and facilities to host them.
  • In a nutshell a lower budget means fewer attendees making we the NEAR Community seem a bit elitist, and which is against the repeatedly stated objective of next billion users.
  • Additionally we can’t squeeze more people into a given venue because there are health and safety issues to consider.

Venue:
This is likely a 2-3 hour event correct?

  • Not quite, the booking starts at 16:00 so we can setup with event schedule starting at 17:45 and concluding at 21:00 venue time has to include setup and teardown so about 5 hours plus

Are there coworking spaces or local universities to host this in Liverpool?

  • Yes there are, however unless you are either a coworking space member or a university staffer or fee paying student the costs still work out the same.

What is the venue?

  • We haven’t selected the specific venue yet, we’ve taken a median based on our selected audience size and location convenience for the audience. Unfortunately venue availability is a big factor with cheaper venues being much harder to secure.

The price point is quite high given the circumstances.

  • With respect to the price point unfortunately the UK is one of the most expensive countries in Europe and Liverpool receives many international guests in the form of Beatles fans, Cruise ships, Football fans (who fly halfway around the world for one game and fly back the next day), European travellers and so on, so the price point is sadly unavoidable.

Media:
Please elaborate on what you plan to do with the post-production of the media?

  • We plan to re-use the post production media as part of an education series on NEAR, hosted on our YouTube.
  • As the content is naturally curated it will help in the creation of learning pathways into the NEAR Ecosystem supporting presenting projects, future activities and events happening in Liverpool, the UK and elsewhere. Again as mentioned above we do have a plan to launch on Aurora so this media would play into that activity as well.

Videographer - Are you making full-length videos and highlight reels?

  • For this we would be turning each talk into it’s own video topped and tailed.
  • The videos would be what we use for the education series above.
  • The highlights reel would be separate used for post event and onward promotion purposes, so presenting projects, future talks, launching on Aurora would all be beneficiaries along with the rest of the community.

Photographers - Wouldn’t that just be the same person snapping stills at the event?

  • For photography sometimes they do bring an assistant, however the photographer knows the angles, poses, interactions, etc to encourage amongst participants so as to take the best commercial grade photos and to ensure presentation their best professional work using their professional equipment.
  • Also they have a more experienced eye in determining which are the best shots to include for release, something that takes years to acquire.

Promotion (Prior to the event)
How will this event be promoted to ensure you get 100 attendees?

  • For this we would be doing an outreach campaign on social media, and across the city to the available learning institutions and co working spaces.
  • We would be doing things like visiting meet up groups and inviting their members to sign up to our event, whilst tracking free ticket sales.
  • On event day we would send out gentle reminders on email and social media.

Event Day Support:
Please outline what swag you want to provide. Shirts?

  • We want to provide T-Shirts, Caps, hoodies and NFTs on NEAR / Aurora, as part of the event we would want to get all attendees to acquire a NEAR / Aurora wallet with an NFT distribution during the event.

Please remove - If a staff member falls sick and missing equipment. - done

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Hi @satojandro

Thank you for the feedback. I read the Regional Strategy and the associated blog with great interest, however the blog was clear that it was focused on token bonded communities which are by nature Extrinsically motivated.

Our pilot presented above on the other hand makes no assumptions about the event audience, we are simply opening the door to the NEAR Ecosystem with a view to let people walk in and see for themselves and get to the point of deciding their motivation i.e. whether they are Intrinsically motivated with NEAR or whether they’re more Extrinsically motivated.

Relationships are a key factor in any successful endeavour as you’ve highlighted, in this case our initiative is taking the first step forward in establishing that relationship with the Liverpool Community and putting said relationship on a sound footing by making sure the outputs and outcomes are enduring. We would love a zero budget approach but that simply isn’t feasible for our context, we value diversity of thought and understanding of circumstance.

We thought about how we work with other Meetups, however we decided our approach would be to simply attend with others and invite their members, whilst we host our NEAR Event totally outside of those groups.

We decided this for two reasons.

  • First content alignment, blockchain let alone NEAR is not aligned with what most of those groups are about.

  • Second we want the NEAR community that spawns in Liverpool to be free of inter-community politics, allowing it to be freely welcoming in it’s own way. To underscore the point, Liverpool is known for it’s artistic creation and innovation, yes from crosswords, dinky toys, football nets, the RSPCA and even to the first purpose built ambulance, these innovations all came from Liverpool, so again we have no desire to restrain the Liverpudlian creativity coming into the NEAR Community.

This will contribute heavily to onward sustainability of the NEAR Community in Liverpool because it will enable the creation of relationships akin to your (@satojandro) experience with HashHouse, which in turn will support a higher quality of NEAR Community scaling that is not at the direct expense of other groups in the city.

Definitely happy to work on the post event way forward with you.

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Hello @cryptocredit thank you for your input.

Indeed we will be looking to approach Regional Hubs once we’ve concluded our pilot, along the same premise as our engagement with Aurora, as that makes more sense.

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Hi @cryptotwilight thanks for answering all the questions and giving responses to the Marketing DAO council.

After reviewing the proposal and submitted materials, I am not able to support allocating community funds to this event at this time. Here’s my reasoning:

  • We are in the midst of working through the way forward for regional strategies. I realize this could be considered a localized meetup vs. part of a larger region-wide community, but the regionality of it does give me reason to want to understand the bigger picture around that discussion in the community/NF/NDC before allocating funds at this price point.
  • In terms of the price point, I am sympathetic to what you’d said above about the region and price points. I still think the price point is high. I think some creativity is often involved in securing space/sponsorship for events like this. For example, many coworking spaces would consider co-sponsoring an event because it is good biz dev for them to get newcomers in the door to see their space. Anyway, I can’t support close to $5K for a few hours for an early stage, unproven series.
  • In most cases, with early stage events and proposers, we ask to see more traction and evidence of audience enthusiasm before funding to this level. I’d recommend building more, growing your community organically and then potentially coming back at a later stage.
  • JobCrypt also appears to be very early stage, which I can appreciate. It takes time to build, but we’d be looking for higher audience and engagement than what’s displayed on your Twitter at this point. I also note that JobCrypt does not (at least in an outward way that I could see as a web site visitor or from your Twitter) have connection to NEAR, so for that reason, I’d recommend continuing to build and coming back when that connection is more evident.

I sincerely wish you luck as you continue to grow (I see you do have an event planned for a week from now). I am closing this proposal out for now.

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