# Grant proposal: Fostering Sweden's Urbit community

Sweden already has one of the most active Urbit communities in Europe. So far, we have:

- An active group, `~millyt-dorsen/sverige`. (For community building.)
- A website, https://urbit.nu/. (For onboarding and information.)
- One meetup executed in Stockholm (11 participants); one more planned; quartely schedule. (For evangelizing/external PR, as well as community building.)
- Two afternoons of Hoon school executed in Stockholm (5 and 3 participants, respectively). (For pulling technical enthusiasts further in.) *This will be discontinued as we will instead merge our efforts with the rebooted Hoon School Live.*

So far we have paid for the meetup venue and website out of our own pockets. ~wicrum-wicrun hosted the first Hoon school in his own living room which has suboptimal furniture for several people to be able to code. Moving forward, we would like to expand and professionalize our efforts.

## Plans

To begin with, there are a few immediate pain points that we would like to resolve:

- The venue that we previously hosted the meetup at will not be able to host us moving forward, and the other places we have managed to find are significantly more expensive.

**Estimated cost:** USD600/meetup

- Having a group at Meetup.com would make it easier for us to attract people from the general tech sphere who have not yet heard about Urbit.

**Cost:** USD10/month

- During the first meetup there were several people who left early to have dinner (the meetup was between 18:00 and 21:00), so we would like to offer food to participants during the next event.

**Estimated cost:** USD225/meetup *(assuming 15 participants and USD15/participant)*

- Our website is fairly deprecated at this point and needs to be updated with up-to-date screenshots, information on app installation, suggestions on apps to install and groups to join, and so on.

**Estimated time:** 24 h

- Getting a planet has been expensive, and still requires a bit of knowledge of Ethereum since most stars haven't put up storefronts yet. We intend to simply give planets to people who discover our community but do not yet have one, granted that they are motivated enough to first boot a comet.

**Estimated cost:** 5 planets/month

Except for these relatively simple things, we also have larger longer term plans:

### Expanding the meetup

Currently, the quarterly Stockholm meetup likely covers the needs of the entire country. We had several participants from other cities, with one of them travelling 550 km (340 miles) to attend; the enthusiasts will come regardless, and Stockholm does have the largest tech scene in Sweden.

We feel that increasing the frequency of the main meetup in Stockholm at this point is likely to dilute the intensity and impact, given the relatively small turnout (11 people), and that out-of-town participants are more likely to attend on a quarterly rather than monthly schedule.

It is also currently not doable for us to expand to other cities given our other commitments, on and off Urbit. However, [this Google Trends heatmap](https://twitter.com/joodaloop/status/1455045965493141508) certainly raises an eyebrow, and relatively soon we expect it to make sense to expand to our two other major cities (Gothenburg and Malmö). Since neither of us live there, we would either have to travel there and host meetups ourselves once our schedules allow, or, hopefully, find willing hosts in these cities and help to educate, support and coach them with our experience.

**Estimated cost:** USD1000/meetup *(venue $600, food $225, travels $175, see venue+food estimates above)*

### Summer retreat

We have also discussed the possibility of ~millyt-dorsen hosting a weekend-long retreat in a property on the island of Öland, one of the main summer holiday locations in Sweden.

**Estimated cost:** USD4500 *(assuming 10 participans, 3 days, $50 food costs per day, and $2800 for lodging/venue)*

## Milestones

These milestones are numbered with both letters and numbers, since all of them aren't necessarily sequential. For example, Milestone A2 presupposes the completion of milestone A1, but any milestones Ax and By are unrelated to each other.

### Milestone A1 – Host four meetups in Stockholm

Expected completion: 12 months
Estimated total cost: USD3420 *(venue, food, meetup group)*
Estimated time required: 80 h *(preparing and practicing talk, general admin)*

Payment: 1 WSTR

### Milestone A2 – Host two meetups in one more city

Expected completion: 12 months
Estimated total cost: USD2000 *(venue, food, travels)*

#### If we do it ourselves

Estimated time required: 20 h *(only admin, can reuse practice/preparations)*
Payment: 0.5 WSTR

#### If we coach a new host

Estimated time required: 50 h *(admin, preparation, scouting)*
Payment: 1 WSTR (to be shared with the host)

### Milestone A3 – Host two meetups in two more cities

Expected completion: 18 months

Estimated total cost: USD2000 *(venue, food, travels)*

#### If we do it ourselves

Estimated time required: 20 h *(only admin, can reuse practice/preparations)*
Payment: 0.5 WSTR

#### If we coach a new host

Estimated time required: 50 h *(admin, preparation, scouting)*
Payment: 1 WSTR (to be shared with the host)

### Milestone B1 – Update the website

Expected completion: 3 months
Payment: 0.25 WSTR

### Milestone B2 – Build an onboarding flow

Create new web pages to help with onboarding, joining groups, app installation as well as video sessions for youtube and similar sites (covering the same topics).

Expected completion: 6 months
Payment: 1 WSTR

### Milestone C – Host a summer retreat

During the summer or early autumn, host a summer (coding/learning) retreat for the Swedish Urbit community, comprising of 10-20 persons on-site.

Expected completion: 8 months

Payment: 1 WSTR