Le Nexus : a Polkadot permanent Hacker's Space

Hi Polkadot,

Following on from Mar1n's presentation of the project during Decoded 2024, we'd like to start a discussion about a new kind of community-driven initiative: a permanent physical space dedicated to Polkadot, acting as an ecosystem lieu de vie and self-filling bounty for domestic ecosystem agent initiatives, with the aim of reducing OpenGov sollicitation while dramatically increasing community activity, reach, visibility and overall impact at a phygital level.

                             

Le Nexus is a polymorphic space in the heart of Paris dedicated to Polkadot's teams and ecosystem agents. It's a hub to emulate community cohesion, support builders, drive adoption and energize business development activities Easily accessible from all over Europe, Le Nexus aims to become the first self-sustainable and community-led Polkadot's physical hub.

 

                               

Supported by a 50-seat for-profit coworking space, a "Parisian Polkadot anti-cafe" and a dedicated web3 event venue, Le Nexus will be a rallying point for community members, teams, content creators, digital nomads and BD agents from Polkadot and beyond.*

Serving as a phygital headquarters for the French-speaking community, these lucrative activities will fund a sustainable domestic bounty, managed by ecosystem agents. This fund is intended for local initiatives, freeing OpenGov from minor requests that local agents are best positioned to assess. The location, its bounty and any initiatives enabled or funded by it, will be managed and overseen by the French-speaking community itself, organized in a DAO largely inspired by the ethos and processes of ChaosDAO but without gating at entry.

                               

This DAO will pioneer a new (yet actually very old) model of legal wrapper in a world-first attempt to create a "shareholder-less liability & for-profit safe-heaven" for all kinds of DAOs. Part of the funds asked will cover the production of an open-sourced report. This legal wrapper will also have as its sole beneficiary the Polkadot Cayman Foundation, making it one of the first self-birthed chapters, while ensuring that all value and assets owned by Nexus are in fact owned by the global representative of our body of token holders. You can access a draft of the proposal and review the location and occupancy plans here: https://lenexus.notion.site/Le-Nexus-bc5644253366436ea9193fdf50bc6d35

For this, we intend to ask to openGov a medium spender of 550k$ USDC to bootstrap the initiative until we reach profitability and become fully independent. The funds will be used as is:

$100k in the form of a loan to cover the guarantee required to rent the space as asked by the owners. This loan will be repaid once Le Nexus has reached profitability. $225k used for the 'polkadotification' of the space, you can check a breakdown of the costs in the draft proposal. $225k used as a 6 month rent 'buffer' to ensure we have enough space to reach profitability. This would be the only payment from OpenGov to Nexus.. Only one salary is included in this proposal: the office manager to make sure the space is managed as greatly as possible We already have the space and an option on it, and most of the rented workspaces are already fully-booked.

This initiative has been cooking for months by different french speaking ecosystem agents: @dgnratd @mar1dev @rom1_dot @Gatorkorps @SuperDupont44 @FunkyPossum @ilooovlro @remidot and @DonDiegoSanchez.

Before publishing it to the community, this initiative has been shared privately among various interested ecosystem agents and also to the Polkadot Hub Bounty’s team and especially @Matej. We’d like to thank all of them as this proposal is the result of all of their inputs.

Thank you for reading and can’t wait to meet all community members at Le Nexus in Paris.

Le Nexus Bureau.