FORMATION timeline by ben68

  Team meetings 1 to 13 (8th April - 29th June 2021): This initial version of UDU is categorised by exploding onto the Upland community in a huge way. With a rapidly expanding team of big players with big personalities, even bigger ideas and the original iteration of players adding their community affiliation acronym to their Discord names, it wasn’t long before we were referred to as ‘The UDU cult’. In this expansionist ‘hype typhoon’ phase, we also initiated and secured several affiliations with other existing and emerging neighbourhood development groups to fall under the UDU node map umbrella and also expanded into a variety of community focussed projects. As time went by and we saw very few of our members actually following through on their grandiose plans and drama associated with community backlash against our ideas began to snowball, cracks in the core foundations of the team became apparent. 

Team meetings 14 to 25 (6th July - 28th September 2021): This version of the UDU is categorised by the release of the SPARK token, property development beginning in Upland and the original iteration of what we called our ‘SPARK TRAIN’. With a dedicated SPARK server now open to the public in addition to our two private UDU and UDUA member servers, what remained of the team began to be fragmented into different areas of focus. In addition to what ultimately was a flawed process for the initial SPARK TRAIN, it became apparent that opening up the server to the public was a move that increased backlash drama and Morecheese began construction on a new ‘all-in-one’ server. When ready all three of the old servers were closed and only actively engaged UDU and UDUA members were invited into the new server. New SPARK TRAIN mechanics were identified and we completed several successful build lists, in any member nominated area available in Upland. A continuation of hollow members (all talk and no action), further community drama along with the emergence of significant differences in the ideologies of key members, saw several well-known players skulking off into the night and/or being actively removed from the team. We also began actively removing or limiting server access to non-active members within the server. What remained was a much smaller but vastly stronger team of committed and coordinated players. This was greatly reinforced by the introduction of stringent new member vetting procedures designed by Finski and supported by Knubx, to ensure we were only onboarding members whose vision and values matched our own.  

Team meetings 26 to 44 (5th October 2021 – 16th March 2022): This version of UDU is categorised by the ongoing strengthening of our core team and a change in the logistics for our SPARK TRAINS. Whereas previously members were able to nominate a property to be built by the trains in any area of Upland, the requirement was changed to only supporting property development within our various UDU nodes.   

The UDU Podcast No.45 to 73 (April 12th - October 25th 2022): Having reached the second year of operations, this version of UDU was categorized by the team focussing the vast majority of our efforts on what we do best, building our nodes and supporting each other’s goals. Through the Metaverse Ventures Entertainment (MVE) Discord server we began exploring greater visabilty and Upland community participation in our weekly meet ups. Node managers were provided with much greater control over how to set up and run nodes and several changes were also made to the process of upgrading and managing members via new roles in our server, including the production and distribution of UDU member NFTs.

The UDU Podcast No.74 and onwards (from November 1st 2022):   

This current version of UDU is categorized by one of our earliest founding members Finski, accepting an upgrade to the position of Executive Manager of the day-to-day running of the server and the team. We remain focused on continuing to build out our existing nodes and supporting each other’s goals, increasing our support of the wider Upland community and further direct engagement of the community in our weekly podcasts.