Here’s what happened at the Blockchain for Good workshop at Devcon4…and what’s coming next!
About a month and half ago, the Alice team started preparing our trip to Prague for that crazy annual Ethereum unicorn-fest called Devcon4. We looked around to see if there were any side events focused on social causes that we could get involved with…but we didn’t find much.
After much bribery and trickery, we eventually managed to get our hands on the draft schedule of the main event (note to the Ethereum Foundation: please communicate earlier on the agenda in future!). To Devcon4’s credit we found out that there would be a big focus on diversity and inclusion this year, but unlike last year, there wasn’t really much dedicated to those of us working on social and environmental applications of blockchain technology.
So we put out a call to a few of our friends in the blockchain for good community to see if they’d want to team up to create our own side event, and their response was just amazing! The result was an incredible workshop that we all put together in just a few weeks, and was better than we could have imagined…and we weren’t the only people to be excited about it. Tickets on Eventbrite and Kickback - an awesome Ethereum ticketing-based service that cuts down on no-shows - sold out in a matter of days, and the event was buzzing on the night.
But first let’s start with why many of us thought that “blockchain for good” should have more visibility at Devcon4:
- It’s important to remember what we’re all building for. There are too many startups using this incredibly powerful technology for crassly commercial tokenised money-grabs. We can’ let that define our space.
- It’s always been harder for socialtech projects to get off the ground and scale than say fintech or proptech. There’s generally less funding and support available, and it’s harder when you have a double bottom-line (financial and social impact).
- There’s so much talent in our sector, and such a collaborative mindset, that it would have been a shame to miss the opportunity to meet up with so many of us in town.
And so the Blockchain for Good workshop was born, focused specifically on encouraging more collaboration in the community, and helping get more great social and environmental projects into production.
We wanted to start by demonstrating that blockchain applications (aka dApps), especially those dedicated to social impact, aren’t just mythical things that will happen in the future — the future is already here! So the event kicked off with MakerDAO’s CEO, Rune Christensen, making a live $1,000 donation in Dai (a stablecoin running on Ethereum) using Status (a mobile Web3 browser) to a new project on the Alice platform run by Forgotten Animals to help abused wild animals in Russia. The Maker team also generously distributed $5 vouchers in Dai to every participant at the event that they could claim and donate in the same way, on their own (you can also donate your Dai to Forgotten animals here — please give generously and see the change your money makes!).
This was followed by a short panel where representatives from Global Brain (who kindly sponsored the event), the Bounties Network, ConsenSys Social Impact, Blockchain for Humanity, Giveth and Alice shared their experience of building and funding dApps that are already in production and being used on a daily basis (you can play the panel back here thanks to our friends at Giveth).
We then got into the meat of the event and broke out into three collaborative workshop groups, led by mentors from the community, and each tackling a different challenge:
- Raising funds for blockchain for good projects, mentored by Nydia from the Social Alpha Foundation and Ken from the Ethereum Foundation’s grants team.
- Improving product design and UX, mentored by Simona from the Bounties Network, Amy from Galileo and Rachel from RightMesh.
- Addressing technical challenges, mentored by Julien from Flyingcarpet, Cedric from Ixo and our very own CTO, Kuba.
The energy and passion of everyone involved in the workshop groups was inspiring, with founders, developers, funders, designers, film directors and students all giving their take on how we can bring more projects to into the real world. Some of the people who showed up weren’t “official” mentors but could just as well have been, representing organisations that do amazing work in our space, such as Rootstock, Colony, Black Girls Code, Hello Gold and impactMarket to name just a few.
What happens in the b4g workshop DOESN’T stay in the workshop!
Although this event may be over, one of the main outcomes was that we all committed to keep the momentum going. Over the next month, we’ll be writing up a summary of the discussions we had during the workshops, and providing feedback on what we learnt so that everyone can help keep growing this decentralised movement forward, scale what already exists, while getting as many new projects off the ground as possible. Expect more events like this next year!
We really want as many of you to be as involved with this as possible, so if you have any thoughts, ideas, or want to find out more, please shoot me an email at dani@alice.si and we’ll add you in to the working group calls.
Once again, a big thanks to you all for making this as great as it was, and watch this space! 🚀
