Hi everyone, most people are in dubai this week and time difference makes it hard to reschedule an opswg meeting. But we wanted to decide the date and venue of Block#11 asap, so please let us decide offline. Below are the candidate events that we consider collocating.
ETHGlobal (Oct 18 - 20, San Francisco USA)
DC Fintech Week (Oct 21- 24, Washington DC USA)
TOKEN2049 (Sept 18 - 19, Singapore)
Pre-ETHGlobal in SF or post-DC Fintech Week in DC would be particularly great options. Please feel free to throw out your opinions here by this Thursday 12 pm UTC. We would like to make a final decision by the end of this week.
In we hold the Block 11 in Bay Area to connect with ETH Global, Stanford (with Dan Boned, but I know it is very expensive to hold confernece at Stanford) or UC Berkeley (with Blockchain at Berkeley) might be the venue.
My vote in order would be DC Fintech Week, ETHGlobal, and then TOKEN. The TOKEN conferences are notoriously pay to play and I feel that level of commerciality goes against our ethos. ETH would be good, but to Chloe’s point, favoring a coin or protocol is less favorable. DC Finech week is run by academics and a non-profit like us, is just commercial enough to not lose money (like us), and would be a great partner on many levels.
Singapore is APAC, we’ve been in this region the previous two blocks, I think that’s a non starter for block 11 for this reason - I agree with Amanda on the type of event also.
Eth global is more of a hackathon event, which has its trade-offs - i’d be interested in exploring Berkley as their zkp research and workshops have been fantastic. Bay area can have multiple things we attach to, however would consider the conflict with DC the following week, so might have to be prior to the eth global weekend (for main participants)
DC, I think has the best alignment with BGINs path of the next 6 months and addresses a wider audience of stakeholders - I could suggest that BGIN be 23rd-25th/26th and we focus on the 25th being the biggest day of workshop for new participants.
I am supportive for the messages from Amanda and Mitchell. If BGIN would prioritize gain support/interest from the public sector in Americas and their counterparts from private sector, DC could be a viable option. Time zome proximity from Europe is another merit to complement if we choose to make the meeting in Swiss to one day for example.
Yes, I also suggest DC would be the No.1 option! On the other hand, we have not been able to get good commitments from people in the Ethereum community for the last 4 years. How about doing Block#11 in DC after the DC fintech week but having a one- or two-day smaller event in SF focusing on technical topics such as Layer 2 governance, key and credentials management, and smart contract security?
Some of us, including me, should be interested in attending ETHGlobal anyway. The event scale can be just for 10-20 people, including some of us and those in the Ethereum community.
The logistics might be harder, but we have enough time to prepare
It seems like most of us vote for DC Fintech Week! so let’s do DC Fintech Week and also consider having a one or two day smaller event in SF around EthGlobal! I will suggest this to the steering committee to get approval.