Global SAFE Pods Proposal

Same thing here. Was originally a PDF I made directly for MaidSafe but I think partially funding it by the community, and having the community guide the videos and work submitted by the “Leaders” as described in this document will be a much more efficient system and even more powerful.

I present…

(Reformatted for better viewing on this Forum & mobile):

Overview

In addition to the Company e-Office Expansion Proposal, I have another proposal that I have been designing, but this time for community expansion. I have been involved with SAFE Pods for years, starting in SF but also attending / hosting in many other countries, and once even officially under MaidSafe, with MS employee @hunterlester .

Over time I have created a larger plan that is written as briefly as possible below, for now:

Events / Leader Requirements

This proposal revolves around (myself, MaidSafe, or both) finding leaders in various countries that are dedicated to MaidSafe and responsible for organizing around 1-2 events each month. They will be compensated (below) and in order to receive that, they must fulfill certain responsibilities, such as securing reliable venues, recording each event, and putting sufficient effort into local outreach (which could be boosted by the MaidSafe e-Office Advertising or SMM Team). Since I have many ideas and plans for the exact execution of this, I would be glad to dedicate my other time online to getting people up to speed for fulfilling these requirements, as I do this constantly with MaidSafe Asia.

I have several “Leaders” in mind throughout Asia, who I know well and would be happy to start, such as Eddie in Jakarta, @aydenlee / @Jinho_Jang in Korea, myself or @Harvindar in Malaysia ($600/mo office), @ken1 Nguyen in Vietnam, And in terms of regulars on the forum for the rest of the world, @goindeep comes to mind for Australia, @happybeing London Meetup group for England, @Joseph_Meagher or Ireland, @frabrunelle for Canada, and Hunter has proven to be too busy for SF but I’m sure I can talk to my other SAFEr’s there. And if any of the above people don’t have time for this $500/mo job, then they can find people for a small bonus perhaps. It would be great for MaidSafe to allow me to develop this template and get people started, as it will be a replicateable model to expand throughout the whole world and increase our community, investors and developer pools. All are important for MaidSafe to succeed and revolutionize the internet. I’d be happy to help and get everyone going, and keep @SarahPentland & @dugcampbell in the loop, and for MS it would just be as easy as sending the crypto (I estimate MS might have $30m - $100m worth, to use for expansion).

Company Payment

Nevertheless I know MaidSafe likes to save money, and these events DO NOT have to be expensive. I estimate monthly costs of $500 for the leader, to keep them committed to it long term, and a final $500 to cover everything else, such as the venue, food, recording equipment, and anything else. Total of $1,000 per country per month, and would give a massive amount of new video material to post, and new members to the MaidSafe movement, in all corners of the world. This $1k could be negotiated down as well, if needed. I saw in my event with @hunterlester that they were paying some high budget for expensive catering, and this is NEVER required / the norm at tech Meetups. Devs are very happy with pizza, sandwiches, yogurt, granola bars etc and that worked much better. This is just one example of tips I can provide when getting new people up to speed.

Benefits

  • Have a standardized, replicateable model for community expansion into new countries
  • I have several powerpoints that I can give for Leaders’ first meetup, then they start making their own
  • I would be happy to spend time getting new people up to speed and creating group channels for us to support each other and post the video / image content created
  • Would integrate nicely with the e-Office proposal I have, as there could be a team creating social media outreach for each of these standardized SAFE Pods (e.g. MS KL Meetup FB / Insta… Page, etc)
  • This means every city involved would have its own complete Social Media outreach initiative to grow from, which is also standardized for the Leaders to use & support
  • Leaders are paid and have responsibilities to fulfill, such as organizing everything and providing lots of recorded content for the community and masses to enjoy and learn from
  • MaidSafe has control of everything, can view materials before they are posted, and can cancel any Leader’s position if the Leader is failing to satisfy the goals
  • All MaidSafe would have to do provide the crypto and then can enjoy the community videos made :slight_smile:
  • Would be a great way to have a standardized template for global community expansion

Notes

I’ve done these events in over 10 major cities in the US and a very sucessful one in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, and through all of these I have seen what works and where efficiencies can be made. I could get going on this as soon as you like and have leaders in mind for several places. I would organize it over Telegram and Trello mostly, or any workflow tools you prefer. Feel free to discuss this internally and then if you agree we can begin one country at a time or so. Would love to get this going, and really want MaidSafe to expand in 2018!

Your Friend,

  • Will “WhiteOutMashups”
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Let me know everyone, what your thoughts are for this.

I feel that having this model will be insanely powerful for MaidSafe global expansion in 2018, which we all want. We need to increase our outreach, so we have more developers, investors and community members, all of which are necessary for expansion and MaidSafe success :slight_smile: Share thoughts below!

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i like the proposal :slight_smile: safe-pods all over the world looks like what we want when the network is a little bit stronger and can perform tasks like streaming music / host chat apps / … without access restrictions

of course it depends a little bit on the budget and how maidsafe wants to proceed from where we are; but since they said they want to start to do more outreach/marketing/… this sounds like a logical next step (i would think starting this after alpha 3 is out and there are some apps to dissect / showcase stuff would help a lot with dev outreach)

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I think this part from my OP is quite key here:

We need to stop pretending like there is any reason to not expand at least 10x more aggressively, as we have about 20x more funds as we did at the beginning of the year.

I’m not saying throw money in random directions without care, but if there are well-thought out plans like this with entire “Price & Risk Minimization” sections (above) then we should totally go for it and what’s the worst that can happen

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I also like the idea of standardised presentations. I’d be interested to hear more about what a SAFE pod is. I think I have a rough idea from your description but a firm definition would be helpful. Also, while it’s good to have a high-level estimate, the money side should be worked out afterwards: $500 goes much further in some places than others (I’m sure you know that anyway!). One other question is how can you be sure you’ve got an audience in all these places? It’s easy enough to book a venue and order some pizzas, much harder to ensure the right people are showing up, not just friends of the organizer or people who like pizza.

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There’s many tools that I use for this, Meetup is great and the integration with my other proposal would give facebook, instagram and all social media campaigns for each country’s group so that it grows properly.

And everyone can see how large or successful they are by the required video recordings themselves, and any increased activity in the group chats I’m setting up for each local area (has proven very successful in SF & Malaysia) and of course by new people signing up on the forum here.

These things also grow over time.

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Word of mouth alone got us 40 followers. It’s proven challenging coz we’re faced with many rejection. I imagine getting people to meet ups will be easier when they’ve heard about the project before from effective marketing or social media sharing.

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I think this could really give the network a good ROI. The long term sustainability of this project imo has to have widespread development of not just apps but eventually core code. First and foremost is outreach and educating others and this will help foster that greatly. I’m behind you 100% on this Will, hope this proposal is adopted!

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This sounds good to me Will. I can’t critique because I don’t have experience, so interested to hear others’ feedback, and of course what MaidSafe think too.

I won’t be able to run meetups though, so the London slot would be open for somebody else to organise. There are other tech centres in UK too, so not just London of course.

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I like the idea. Perhaps we trial it in Korea as an initial start up or 2 or 3 places. Why Korea? Look at what happened to Ripple when the Koreans caught on.

What is a budget figure per country and then all countries. Perhaps the community can fund all of it for 2018

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But I’m more excited about the company one here. I think it’s the most important, so MaidSafe can have constant marketing and experience:

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you can get the notion of Global SAFE Pods groups going pretty rapidly in the existing huge social biz network site linkedin where followers can be moderated, setting up geographic and language oriented SAFE pods within linkedin is pretty straight forward, perhaps linking these SAFE Pod groups to create an outbound linkedin centric marketing awareness effort

https://www.linkedin.com/company/9320756/ the MAIDSafe company page

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I’ve not read entirely but I think MS paying is a bit of a stretch when the project is not even complete.

In any case pinging @PeterRobertson as he has organised all of the Melbourne meet ups.

Also cost for us in Aus is nowhere near that expensive which means it cannot possibly be that expensive in other parts of the world as our cost of living is very high.

Here you can rent community rooms for free maybe a small donation and tea coffe and biscuits or donuts will always suffice. Budget IMHO should be like $150 per event. I’d pay this myself if required but would prefer if jt was exchanged for maidsafe coin :slight_smile:

There would definitely be a lot of footage video, audio and other content and social points to come out of it but I’d personally prefer to have a more technical person ride shotgun with me but I’d be happy to host. Count me in.

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Love your action and encouragement @goindeep. Just sayin’ :slight_smile:

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These days there are so many money scams that involve bitcoin or some form of coin. I think having a coordinated campaign such as the one proposed will somewhat help people overcome the fear of Maidsafe being a scam.

A standardized presentation helps send a common message out to potential Safers. This is critical. People mostly see the economic value before they start to understand the technology behind. What Maidsafe is doing is simply awesome and truly exciting. This from a non-technical person like me is a big compliment. We should help the existing community share a common message.

We often get rejected. But that has not deterred the few in Malaysia. It is key that we get more people to adopt when we do eventually go life with the network. Having Pods across the globe will only help realize the adoption sooner.

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VOTING Enabled

I just moved this Global SAFE Pods Proposal to the Ideas category like @frabrunelle said. Now people can vote for it so that we can have MaidSafe groups in many countries :slight_smile:

Vote at the top here if you want to see MaidSafe groups exist around the world! :smiley:

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Perhaps I missed this in the text, but it was unclear if these meetings would be
for marketing/outreach purposes or for accumulating dev talent and actually working on code.

EDIT:

Sorry, missed the pods for all of the above part.

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If anyone wants these SAFE Pods to exist and spread around the world, please vote here!

I’ve put all my proposals into one, for the same cost as 1 short video from the other guys :stuck_out_tongue: vote!

It would seem to me that it would be better to have SAFE Pod discussions grouped as subchannels or categories on this forum and the forum.safedev.org. On irc freenode, subchannels could also be used via #safenetwork-sydney, or #safenetwork-boston etc. That way people don’t need a linkedin account in order to contribute to the projects.

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the linkedin idea suggested is as an outward bound dragnet for talent and also investment in MaidSafe, it’s the biggest biz network on the planet and also many of the brightest tech minds are there…

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