Hello NEAR herd! Swine Guild co-founder Coyote here 
For 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 don’t 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.
I have made it my personal mission to expand the reach of our work by supporting meme content in other languages than English. You may have seen the update about Swine Guild Russia, seen their Twitter or our mention of them in our end-of-month post. This collective has been doing solid, consistent work under the Swine Guild since their launch two weeks ago.
The Nitty-Gritty
The reason for this particular post is to share with the community an extension of this initiative: the translation of our memes into new languages, Spanish and Nigerian Pigdin English. In July, @andrewmamus reached out with the ambitious proposal to translate all the NEAR memes out there on the interwebs. Following his proposal, I reached out to the NEAR Hispano community to see if there was a Spanish speaker interested in translating memes for us as well. Soon after posting the details for this position in their Discord, @aklassen and @Portes agreed to translate our memes into Spanish, and Miguel offered to share the Spanish memes on the instagram account he runs, NEAR Dominicana. Aside from sharing memes, Miguel is also in charge of announcing the NEAR Hispano boot camps on social media. Andrew is an avid content creator who runs the Twitter account @near_nig and @aklassen is currently involved in the development of a Money-Saving dapp (on NEAR) called Tanda.
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 two 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 Guild’s efforts, as we want to establish our role in the community as the meme hub and essentially the comedy central of NEAR Protocol’s Ecosystem. These three members are both interested in this kind of long term growth and have established 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 it’s wonderful attributes, and have a lot of fun doing it.
Mission
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 NEAR’s goal to enable community-driven innovation to benefit people around the world. The words “open and user-friendly” appear over and over in most people’s 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 all for your continued support! We are overjoyed by all this growth in such a short time frame, and we are looking forward to much more in the future.
Stay Boarish,
Coyote