At the NEAR Intelligence Agency, we celebrate the open web and strive to foster creative and innovative advancements in community building, with the sole intention of introducing NEAR to a larger array of creators, contributors, and users. Therefore, to keep the NEAR Community on top of things, it was decided by the NIA Core Team to release a lucid public roadmap to highlight our plans for the future. We believe this will help us communicate our goals more effectively to the NEAR Community, for all intents and purposes, and to give a bird’s eye view of our Guild. While plans are always subject to change given the dynamic crypto-landscape, our intent, commitment and guiding principles will always be the same — growth of the NEARverse, with emphasis on larger and more inclusive participation of everyday users.
NEAR Intelligence Agency was started as a Guild, under the Warp Speed Guilds Program, to supercharge the launch and facilitate faster scaling of NIA activities and to allow us to move aggressively towards our goals. While we will continue to experiment, engage, explore and evolve as part of the Warp Speed Guilds Program, the eventual goal is to have NIA positioned as a key component in the NEAR Ecosystem, with a product-suite, service-range and governance of its own. The long-term plan is to replace the NIA as the main organization, effectively making it one of the many sub-units contributing to the broader NEAR Intelligence Collective (NIC) group.
The NEAR Intelligence Collective (NIC) will eventually be NIA’s final form (we love Dragon Ball) and will replace the NIA as the parent organization to a host of contributing units that will work along side NIA to further the NIC’s vision, staying true to the vision of decentralization and the open source economy, Once incorporated, the NIC will become a non-profit entity and will be overseen, funded, managed and governed by a separate NEAR Intelligence Collective DAO which would comprise of council members from the NIA Founding Team and the NEAR Core.
NIA will continue to function as the main organization, bootstrapping the various sub-groups, till each of our initiatives stand on their own feet, eventually passing the baton to NIC and moving on to assume a niche role in the NIC Family. The long-term plan for the NIA is to build and deliver solutions that will cater to the NEAR Community independent of the NIA, staying true to the vision of the decentralized economy, bringing all moving pieces and pooling them to paint the big picture. The NIA’s work can only be quantified by the impact of our activities and quality of our implementation. The following is an an attempt to list some of the currently planned (some undergoing) NIA initiatives along with a description of where they fit in our roadmap:
- Promotional and Auxiliary Activities: Helping NEAR Protocol and projects launching in the NEAR Ecosystem gain more traction and attract more users is one of our primary focus. From helping them with digital outreach, to formulating community engagement strategies and from supporting their operations to assisting them with testing, reviews and forming partnerships with influencers and other biz entities in the blockchain space. Reaching out to influencers and setting up interviews/podcasts with NEAR Developers, reaching out to blog/newsletter publishers and try to get them to spread the word about NEAR Protocol to their subscribers, all of this will be spearheaded by the Mercantile Caucus, a sub-group of the NIA. How do we reach out to influencers without involving corporate jargon or sounding like desperate shills will always be key in executing this game plan. We believe a good outreach strategy can help elevate a transactional relationship between various projects/individual contributors to an ideological bond, where they feel one with the idea of NEAR and stick around with us for the long haul! Mercantile Caucus will not only focus on influencer targeting but reaching out to other projects and teams in the industry as well, taking cue from the iconic Whiteboard Series by NEAR Founders, we will always work towards building bridges between different communities just like the developers are building bridges between various blockchains. Positioning NEAR at the center of discussions, starting conversations around NEAR and fostering collaboration by way of outreach, providing assistance, driving awareness and seamless information sharing is our main focus.
- Experiment, Emulate, Elucidate, Effectuate: Learning from our experiences, tweaking strategies to continue refreshing approaches that don’t work, emulating the success of one initiative to another and most importantly improving upon strategies that work. Incubating and bootstrapping our initiatives to build multiple independent supporting units within the NIA, each focused on their own agendas and service class will be instrumental in achieving maximum results. The confluence of all our activities will be an unwavering synergy to get more participants in the ecosystem. This will be the way forward. Can’t think of a better description to communicate this idea more suitably than that famous dialogue from Brad Pitt’s Moneyball, “we’re not buying players, we’re buying wins here!”
- Content Creation and Content Publishing: There is no dearth of reviews and blogs about NEAR Protocol and its ever expanding ecosystem so the idea here is to do something different, something that hasn’t been done yet in the NEARverse and scale it up to become an independent activity. Enter Stream Team, a group of dedicated and skilled content creators, gamers, columnists and art aficionados who will focus on creating an array of Web-3 edutainment content around NEAR. The NEAR Stream Team sub-group of the NIA will initially and primarily partner with creators to stream their games, media and NFT content (built on NEAR), before expanding to provide other ancillary services to them and the NEAR Community. It will also involve working in conjunction with other ecosystem participants and several NFT peeps in this niche. Stream Team will not just stream content on their own but will also invite veterans and pros in the NFT/blockchain gaming and media space to be their guests.
- Putting together a Creative Strategy: We always look forward to working with like-minded, creative people to do our bit in populating the talent pool using NEAR as their primary biz infrastructure. With this thought in mind we have planned on working on an artist onboarding and networking strategy. The process will involve outreach, networking, experimentation and documenting our experience. The goal is to work closely with art aficionados and creative leaders in the NEAR Ecosystem and to assist them in their work. We want to take the burden of community building off the shoulders’ of artists and creative leaders so they can focus single-mindedly on creating awesome projects and amazing artwork, which coupled with the state of the art NEAR tech, will set the art community on NEAR apart from other protocols. Building a database of artists to target, onboard, promote, incubate or even sponsor will be key to towards this goal and will be open-sourced for the entire community to help them navigate the art space on NEAR. Creative Strategists will be another sub-group of the NIA in the ‘near’ future.
- Balancing stealth and zealously unconcealed advocacy: We formed the NIA with this unique idea of building a covert dark ops organization, one that would work behind the scenes and that would always be the identity of the NEAR Intelligence Agency, hence the name. But, we love the NEAR ecosystem so much that we had to abandon some of our original plans and come up with new ones to see how we can better serve the community and make a place for ourselves in the broader NEARverse. So we are now focused on working on the surface as equally as we are working under the surface. We have come up with a new set of plans to incorporate the best of both worlds: working as loud enthusiasts and working as silent cartographers to build this roadmap. The priority right now is to make the NIA super flexible to grab opportunities for growth, by either of the two ways, as the situation demands. This is an evolving process so we will be mindful of not biting more than we can chew at any point of time. It is always better to let the work speak for itself and journal all the learnings after experimenting rigorously with a wide range of ideas and approaches. Even after the establishment of NIC, this particular area of focus will be overseen by the NIA because in a few months, we will be fairly experienced and equipped to kick things into second gear.
- Collaborating with the NEAR Degens and NEAR Guilds: NIA hopes to position itself as the one-stop hub for social advisory, community strength optimization and outreach services for the NEAR Degens and other Guilds in the NEAR ecosystem. Exploring avenues for partnerships by voluntarily reaching out to service specific Guilds to seek their help in executing our plans and being available to help them with their needs will be our collective goal to build strong community driven systems within the NEAR ecosystem. We are always open for collaboration and brainstorming to roll out projects together. Whether it be helping other Guilds reach a wider audience, or scaling their throughput, NEAR Intelligence will be there 24x7 throughout the year :)
This is a fluid roadmap aimed at giving readers a brief overview of the direction we are focusing on. To keep up to speed with rapid developments and frequent radical changes in trends within the industry, we have decided to keep the public roadmap evolving. We will keep updating it and add more information to this journal over the coming months as we progress on the learning curve doing our bit to build a bigger, stronger NEAR community!
