Hi friends, @lehard writing. At year’s start, right after the New Year, there was a meetup that was significant for our team. Right during the meetup we officially announced our mapala.net project to the Russian speaking audience, and only a couple weeks later launched a pre-ICO, where we gathered first finances for our project.

I was invited to the meetup before the New Year, with the pitch being that it was a meet of the local blockchain-community. It is important to notice, that Russian blockchain scene isn’t significant outside of Moscow even in million cities. As for the existence of Miass city, where the meetup was going to happen, only a few people know even in Russia.

I’ve celebrated New Year in St. Petersburg, and on the 1st of January, I had a great opportunity to spend new year's holidays in northern capital of Russia. There was also an option to go to Moscow and party with my friends. But some inner feeling was suggesting that I go to Miass.

In the end I went from St. Pete to Moscow on Blablacar, and after spending a day there, I took a flight to Chelyabinsk, which is closest city to Miass that has an airport. There @dark.sun met me, and we arrived to Miass by midnight. We stopped in a cozy hostel, where other participants were going to arrive.

Miass is a rather interesting city. It is situated 100 kilometers from the region’s capital of Chelyabinsk. About 150 thousand people live there, but if you count the inhabitants of nearby smaller towns and villages around it, the total amount of inhabitants is going to be around half a million people. Miass stretches along the nearby mountain range for 25 kilometers.

Ural brand cars are manufactured there, they are utilized by the Russian army, also Makeev Rocket Design Bureay that develops aerospace technology. Nearby lake of Turgoyak is one of the top ten cleanest lakes on the planet.

Day 1 (4th of January)

Not everyone who wanted to go to Miass was able to attend, so we ended up with 6 people (@dark.sun, @lehard, @uralresp, @anasta, @kilogramm82 и @tatiana). We started by occupying the hostel’s kitchen, where we set up a cozy working space.

There is a popular song in Russia, where a girl is singing: “...you have a beard, so I’ll tell you Da…”. It seems that a lot of guys believed her and grown beards. ;)

For productive work, we needed to understand what everyone was looking for. So we decided that a good start would be to get acquainted, to understand what common do we have, where everyone is headed, and how we could be of use to each other, and what part of the journey we can stick together. Everyone talked about themselves, about how they see themselves in the blockchain industry, and what projects they would like to participate in.

Several interesting ideas and possible development paths were sounded, but we decided that first steps should be aimed at precise palpable results. This was a really good use for Mapala, since it is an easily understandable project, with a detailed plan, which was already being worked on. We decided that the most effective action would be to concentrate on it.

Before the end of the day we talked through and written down first steps in more detail according to the plan, and from there publish the announcement, and did an officially launched Mapala into the proverbial sea voyage.

Day 2 (5th of January)

We finished working on the plan, and published it for the rest of our Mapala team, that were absent from the meet. Did a detailed write up of our pre-ICO mechanism that we successfully launched 2 weeks ago, and received our first investments.

Meetup organizer @uralresp did a short cultural program, shown us the city and told us about its history. We visited a really cool place “House of the merchant Smirnov”. Local entrepreneurs renovated the building from ruin and made a museum, a cafe, a theatre and a lot of other things there.

Before

After

Inside

On 6th of January everyone went home to digest information and write up their personal plans.

Offline meetups are great, that is why we decided to continue a practice of those work sessions in the field, where we combine work and recreation. I write this post from one such meetup, which is happening away from the civilization. It is an atmospheric place in a dome house, located in an eco village.

In upcoming posts we’ll tell about the results of this meetup, as well as share the results that we were able to reach in three weeks after the New Year.

Translated by @xanoxt for MapalaNet project