# Project update: April 2023

## Highlights

- Secured 3 months grant from Lens to build integration into the Lens ecosystem
- Moved core project communication to [github discusssions](https://github.com/orgs/neume-network/discussions)
- Community continues to grow, with a focus on cross-open source project collaboration (e.g. with [Public Assembly](https://www.public---assembly.com/))
- Continued exploration of grant opportunities

## Lens

As I stated in my last post through this blog, [Taking neume to escape velocity](https://neume.network/posts/taking-neume-towards-escape-velocity/), we have three key goals over the next few months:
- Financial independence from one single party
- Multi-party requirements informing the development roadmap
- Compounding growth of developers and users of neume

The opportunity to build into the Lens ecosystem hits across all three objectives, supported by a very kind grant.

Lens offers specific questions, not less in that it challenges some of our previous architecture decisions - the use of "publications" (and "pubID" identifiers) vs. our current build of building around "tokenID"s for example.

The first month of our Lens engagement will focus predominently on generalising the neume architecture, moving into the development and implementation of Lens specific strategies to also focus the crawler towards Polygon and Lens contracts.

Additionally, we are thinking hard at the moment around indexing "curation" and "agreements", with Lens offering the perfect envionrment in which to explore some ideas.

We are currently discussing the Lens engagement in depth in a github discussion [here](https://github.com/orgs/neume-network/discussions/15_).

## Communication

As alluded to above, we decided last month that we had hit the limit in what discord could provide the community in terms of effective communication and sought to find a more suitable alternative.

After much research, looking at discourse and other options, we decided as a group that github discussions hits the mark in terms of well structure topics, open-ness, and closeness to the code.

We are in the process of fully moving over to this new home for communication. If you have any questions, thoughts, feelings, emotions, or otherwise, then please come and join us [here](https://github.com/orgs/neume-network/discussions)!

As part of this move we have also moved our weekly open office to google meet, which is open to anyone to join. [Add to your calender](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/event?action=TEMPLATE&tmeid=NXA1aTQwMDNkYzgzZWw0aGNqNGRrdTRqdTBfMjAyMzAzMjNUMTUwMDAwWiA4MzhiNzE1NThiZjM4OTRlNWYzZTZhMTI1MzFiODIzMjZhZGFiN2E0NTZjZTQxYTU0ODBjMjY2YTk0OTUwOGVlQGc&tmsrc=838b71558bf3894e5f3e6a12531b82326adab7a456ce41a5480c266a949508ee%40group.calendar.google.com&scp=ALL).

Finally, I know that these updates are a useful addition to interested parties that don't have the time to engage on a day-to-day, so I will be utilising the blog a lot more going forwards. I promise.

## Community

The community building neume continues to grow, both from a shipping and discussion persepctive. A key highlight from our last few open office sessions being the engagement of a number of guys from the Public Assembly community, special shout out to KD!

The beauty of open source projects is that it is not only the code that is open and composable, but the people surrounding it also. I find the persuit of common edges personally very exciting and can't wait to see how this develops going forwards.

To facilitate a group group of active participants, we decided as a group to expand the project maintainers, promoting [il3ven](https://github.com/il3ven) and [neatonk](https://github.com/neatonk) to join [myself](https://github.com/djfnd) and [reimertz](https://github.com/reimertz) as stewards of the project.

At the very core of the values that we are building neume towards is the belief that the best open source projects are open to anyone to join, at whatever level they wish, and to pursue whatever interests them. The net summation of our efforts defines the overall output of neume. So, please join us. We want to hear your thoughts.

## Grants

As mentioned, in this blog and the one previously, financial independence for neume remains my number one priority. Aka, it's grant szn bby.

I am thinking through greater plans of public goods funding for the wider onchain music ecosystem, and so if anyone else is interested in this topic then please [hit me up](https://twitter.com/dan_djfnd).

In the meantime though, our short-term focus will be on augmenting the grant that we have recieved for building into the Lens ecosystem with putting together a strong application for the incoming Gitcoin "Beta" round.

Gitcoin rounds operate on "quadratic" match funding, and so we will be putting together a marketing campaign for neume alongside the bid to build as much interest as we can. Please keep an eye out for this and support us wherever you can.