While I spend a lot of time chatting with other members of our community, I rarely get a chance to spell out:
1) what our project really is about,
2) what we actually do,
3) what the end goal is.
So let me try to answer those three questions, in my own way.
But first, let me just introduce myself – I am, MRFR, one of the 4 moderators of our Portage Park server. Nice to meet you all. My handle, in case anyone wonders, just happened to be my teacher code at a school I used to work at – yep, I’m a highschool teacher – and I rather enjoyed that it also happened to sound like M****r f****r, especially as I innocently signed off my emails, “All the best, MRFR”.
- What is this all about?
The elevator Pitch goes something like this: we want to create a community in the Upland metaverse that goes beyond buying and selling NFT’s – a community which delivers on the social promise of the Metaverse as an actual (and virtual) place to hang out that is both fun and open to anyone and everyone. So while Upland so far has had a focus on the earning part of their tagline “play, earn and connect” we want to develop the other two components – to play and connect.
This might sound cheesy, I know, but it makes so much sense once you are involved. As early adopters, we get the added benefit of creating something new and larger than any one of us.
One of the reasons we chose Portage Park rather than any other neighbourhood was that it wasn’t popular – it wasn’t one of the exclusive neighbourhoods that got minted in the first five minutes of its release. On the contrary, it was a massive and largely unminted land of ignored opportunity, far away from the big buildings and the big bucks of downtown Chicago.
So what some might have seen as a drawback – the sheer size of Portage Park with its 14365 properties making it impossible for even the largest of whales to monopolise – we saw as an opportunity: No matter how much we bought and built ourselves, there would always be room for others. It would always be easier to join Portage Park than any of the other, fancier neighbourhoods. If you want a big community, that is what you want.
Another reason we chose Portage Park has to do with @Hanzilla’s Polish grandmother. That story is probably best told by Hanzilla himself, which I am sure he would be happy to do someday, but let’s just say that there are some genuine historical reasons Portage Park carries a special meaning and why we colour coordinate all our buildings in Red and White.
In the long run, we also believe that this focus on playing and connecting also happens to be good business. While most of us rarely find the need to ever mention it, we are hoping this strategy will help us to spawn one of the first player-generated collections in Upland history.
Ok, I think that hopefully is the beginning of an answer to the first question, what our project really is about. So let’s move over to the next question, about what we, actually, do.
- Ok, sure. But what is it that you actually do?
The short answer is that we do everything we can to reach our most immediate goals, and those goals have been changing fast! With the amount of change we have seen in the last three months, it’s been hard to keep up.
Our first goal was to just have some fun developing the Portage park community and making plans on how to build up the core of the neighbourhood. Once that took off our second goal was to expand our presence into the full neighbourhood, eying neighbourhood wide development. With the arrival of spark, our third goal was to begin constructing buildings along common guidelines, in a way that promoted design cohesion.
While these might seem like noble goals, the harsh truth is that all of them have been surpassed by reality; by actual progress far beyond anything we expected or even dared to hope for.
Portage Park is now the largest construction site in the whole of Upland, with over 500 spark staked (to be compared with the 153 spark staked in the second most staked neighbourhood – Outer Sunset). And while we didn’t even make the top 50 list in terms of completed buildings a month ago, we are now in second place, quickly catching up to the number 1, Outer sunset. If we manage to keep the current amount of spark, we expect to reach first place in the first quarter of 2022.
So how did it happen? I’m actually not sure. All I know is that it is the product of hard work and coordinated efforts by everyone one involved – the moderator team as well as all our members, consistently doing what they can to make this project more and more amazing.
As mods, our focus has been on creating some basic infrastructure, such as our website portagepark.me with all the latest listings (courtesy of our specialist programmer @Shayan and other community info), to lay out some basic principles to work towards (such as our building guidelines) and to organise events: our spark trains, minting competitions, the logo competition (won by Regi, the artist behind our AMAZING logo), and our currently ongoing Founders token competition (ending the day we minted our last FSA property) as well as our building competition (ending December the 18th).
Fig 1. Early mockup of our Founders tokens (courtesy of @Smuckus, to be distributed to all qualifying members on the day Portage Park is fully minted, whenever that is. (There are still some FSA’s left!).
Ok, nuff said about what’s been done. Let’s move on to our final question – the end goal(s)?
So, what exactly will we accomplish with all of this in the long run?
Well, your guess is as good as mine, but as I’m the guy actually typing this up, let me share some of the things I am looking forward to:
- A self governing community run by the people for the people
I would love to see Portage Park turn into a democracy of sorts. We are currently thinking about how to increase members’ involvement in the running of our community. I have some quite elaborate things that I am looking forward to sharing with our community, and we have already created our first specialist roles to actively involve various experts (atm programmers and artists) in the running of our community. More about this in our next town hall meeting on Monday night.
- Regular art competitions/festivals and other fun stuff
It turns out that our community has a lot of talented artists. We want to leverage that by not only giving them a chance to showcase their art, but to also create and share it as NFT’s among our members. Our Founders token (courtesy of @Smuckus), free Portage park NFTs (courtesy of @JohnFitzwell)
- Businesses, lots of them.
- To do whatever Portage Park wants to do.
Portage Park is a pretty special place for me, and also one of the most welcoming places to others. So join us and tell us what you want Portage to be!
Yeah, let’s end this post with that little soundbite. Thanks for making it this far!
UPDATE – We are now fully minted! The last FSA’s just flew out the window. So now each and everyone of our 14365 properties has found itself an owner. This is an amazing milestone and a list of all the Founding Members is now compiled so that we can distribute the commemorative coins to everyone who has qualified. Next step – build, build, build! P.S. If you want to contact me or one of the other moderators, you are best off joining our Discord server here
Find out more details about is in the Upland Guide Directory