It is time to share another Nangu update! I hope that you are all doing well and that you are healthy. As I am writing this from my home-office in Amsterdam, today will be a super warm day here, 27°C ☀️, I am looking forward to enjoying some of the great weather later today.

As usual, let me give a quick update on our community development. If you just joined the Nangu journey I want to wish you a warm welcome 🤗! As of today, 451 people have joined us on Facebook and 84 people are part of our Instagram community. It is heartwarming to see that our community is slowly but surely growing.

Now, you might have seen that there was no update for two weeks. Let me explain what happened: It turned out that we needed to focus on our planning and we felt that there was no noteworthy update to share with you. Because of this, we also decided to rename the “Nangu Weekly” to “Nangu Update”. The Nangu Update will continue to be a regular update, and also allows us to prioritize other topics when we feel like that is the right thing to do.

Nangu Planning

As mentioned above, we have been deep down in our planning process. The last Nangu Update already highlighted some of the areas we were looking at. Let me share some insights into this and how “Planning” at Nangu actually works. First of all, everything starts with our vision and our long term goal to launch the Nangu MVP. From this, we have built a roadmap which is a “best guess” at how we think we can get there and what steps we believe are required. We believe that roadmaps are not there to be followed exactly to each step. Roadmaps rather represent a snapshot at a given point in time of how we can reach our goals and stay true to our vision. It is OK for the roadmap to change, because we and our environment changes all the time. Our vision is our north-star, not our roadmap.

Nangu Planning Process

Based on our roadmap, we then plan our work in cycles of 6 weeks. 6 weeks is long enough to make meaningful progress on significant topics and yet small enough to help us stay focused.

Our planning process works as follows: We first have a retrospective of our last cycle and review what went well and what areas we think we together can improve to become a stronger team. The result is a list of 1-3 items which we will review weekly in the cycle to come. Note that those are not the actual goals for our cycle.

We then start reviewing our Roadmap and propose a list of topics we want to focus on. This is a fairly scrappy and disorganised process which feeds from three places: 1. Previous work which was not done, 2. The roadmap, 3. Ideas which we didn’t have in the roadmap and which we want to discuss. We collaborate on this in a shared document and then slowly distill clear objectives and goals for the upcoming cycle. Once we have agreed on the scope for the cycle as a team we freeze the cycle planning. We then move all goals including their objectives into Basecamp, the tool we use to do our project management.

From here on, we are back to working on concrete items. We review our priorities on a weekly basis and have clear tasks for each of us.

So how does the current cycle look like?

Current 6-week Focus

In our planning we decided that we will be focussing on two areas for this cycle: 1. Core Team and 2. Nangu Whitepaper. Both topics go hand in hand, so let me dive into some of the details.

Core Team

Nangu is an ambitious project with a vision which we hope will impact many many people all over this planet and the planet itself in a positive way. Already today, as we progress on our roadmap, we need to dive deep into a broad range of topics, so that we can continuously get more clarity on our next steps. Those topics for example include our Agroforestry Plan, which is a key component to our strategy. Other topics are our Economic Modelling, the Nangu Governance which we have already written about and many more. To accomplish getting clarity in these areas, Nangu is dependent on great people with deep experience in those respective areas. And thus, we are building the Nangu Core Team.

We have been incredibly fortunate already today that we are allowed to work with what we believe are some of the greatest people in their field. Over the coming weeks we hope to share more about our team.

If you are interested in joining Nangu and feel like there is a way for you to contribute, please reach out to Francisco. Even when you think that there might not be an immediate way to contribute but you are still interested, please reach out! To make Nangu happen, we need your help.

Nangu Whitepaper

The Nangu Whitepaper on the other hand will be the artefact which describes each and every relevant aspect of Nangu. The whitepaper will be for us, for interested partners, advisors, investors, etc. and for you so that you can get a deep understanding of our journey. It will cover our Vision and Mission, the Nangu Strategy, our Agroforestry plans, our Values, our Governance Vision, the Team and many more areas.

To get our whitepaper to a point where we can say, “this is a strong foundation” – we need the expertise and deep knowledge of the Nangu Core Team, each with their respective strengths. So together we are creating the building blocks of what will become Nangu.

Over the coming weeks we expect to get clarity in a range of areas which will be covered by the Nangu Whitepaper – and we can’t wait to share this work with you!

For now, this concludes this week’s summary. Please follow us on Instagram if you are interested in our next steps. Take care!