Nimiq Community Meetup

First Edition — Amsterdam

Hi!

For those who do not know me, my name is Ricardo Barquero Carranza (Richy most of the times) and I help with communication between the Nimiq Community and the rest of Team Nimiq. Lately, I have been focusing on achieving a faster flow of information between Team Nimiq and community developers. After all, it is the Nimiq Ecosystem itself that mostly thrives on the work of community developers. They provide a vital contribution by building projects, testing new features, debugging/sending reports and, last but not least, sharing ideas.

While chatting with users from the community, I noticed the creators of a good number of projects are based in the Netherlands. It is no surprise that one of the tech capitals of the world is also home to a good number of highly-skilled Nimiq supporters. It’s amazing when you see the current list of Nimiq Ecosystem Apps and find that the following projects have a Dutch stamp:

• Twini, is a bot for Twitch. We have used it to donate to charity via Twitch and it worked amazingly. The idea of having a circular flow of NIM in the gaming ecosystem is genius.
• Sushipool is an international effort. It has a good number of supporters that have translated the website into 18 languages already. But a couple of their technical rockstars are Dutch. Including the creator of the coolest block explorer I have ever seen.
• Nimiqprice is the first community project built for Nimiq (that I can remember, correct me if I’m wrong please). A nice and minimal website with the price of NET (Yes! It’s outdated, I already talked with the creator about it ;), he is not actually Dutch but living in Amsterdam at the moment).
• Poolwatch, the community’s favorite pool explorer, is also Dutch. You can tell it was developed fueled by frikandellen and kroketten.

I started brainstorming the idea of a very first Nimiq International Meetup, in Amsterdam. A small meetup to discuss collaboration and strengthen bonds with current project leads based near the Netherlands.

To add to this already nice list of projects, with support from Team Nimiq, we were able to arrange the visit of Vasconcelos: Brazilian community organizer, and developer. His contributions and feedback after the launch of the Mainnet have been invaluable. To build on top of that, his current use case of allowing users to mine Nimiq while visiting his streaming platform is very interesting as it shows the behavior of the network under heavy stress conditions.

The Result?

A very cozy and enriching experience that definitively had an overall Nimiq feeling to it. With amazing outcomes like:

• Sushipool — Onplay (Brazilian streaming service) contributions related to Nimiq Pool Server optimizations and stress tests.
• Twini’s request for a new feature for the Nimiq keyguard, which is being considered by the Core Team.
• Community members starting an effort to support MongoDB in pool servers.
• Nimiq.community site gets more administrators and also plans to translate it into several languages.
• New ideas for DDOS mitigation in pool servers.
• Progress with Nimix, Nimiq Transaction Mixer that provides a certain degree of anonymity.
• A plan to communicate faster over community channels to allow developers in the community to reach Nimiq Team easier and faster.
• A closer relationship with a very activate part of our community.

Blueprint for future Meetups

Community members were really happy with the meetup. I am very happy with it too. However, I’m mostly thinking about improvements for the next Meetup and metrics to measure the success of this one. For it to be successful, it needs to bring actual short-term benefits to the overall community and that is something that we will notice, during the next number of weeks by monitoring the progress of the projects involved in the meetup. In the long term, Meetups are very important too as they increase communication between members and bring back the social factor to an otherwise remote and aloof interaction.

This first edition was a minimal version of a Meetup which is bound to improve. We plan to have Meetups somewhat more regularly and, in my opinion, it made sense to start small building a blueprint for future Meetups. I also want to encourage you to contact me in case you have ideas or if you would like to host your own Meetup and let me know what kind of support or sponsorship you might need.

I would like to thank again all the participants for taking the time to attend and for being part of the community. You guys are awesome!

See you soon!