Coming out of stealth
Every minute, we are growing more and more confident that this incredible beauty of a hackathon is about to be a huge success. So we decided to come out of stealth and reveal who we are. You aren’t about to read any CVs, but instead, some background to understand the motivations of the individuals pulling this off together in our free time, nights and weekends (if you ask Chris Dixon, a good indicator for being onto sth ;)).
Spiritual sponsors: In a galaxy, far far away (FullNode in March), the rebellion was forming. (Just kidding, I am not going to go through with a StarWars analogy all the way.)
María Paula (Day job: communications at Golem and helping out ECF) and Alex (back then still with Brainbot, now in media and real estate) decided to bring the Ethereum community back to where everything started: Berlin. María Paula describes herself as a shapeshifter, doing whatever she is most curious about. For ETHBerlin, that is tons, but mainly hackers, some blogposts and running the hackathon on dApps. It is fair to say that without her incredible energy (look through twitter if you want a taste), ETHBerlin wouldn’t have become what it is today. Alex, as all great entrepreneurs do, takes care of whatever needs to be done. He’s the budget guy, the swag guy, the website maintenance guy and much much more.
PR and Design: What’s an early-stage startup, if it doesn’t have great communications being enhanced by a coherent visual identity. Helena (PR, comms and events for AdEx) is the one behind many of the amazing blogposts and content, additionally taking care of all the PR around ETHBerlin. She has also been working on the comms for ETHGlobal, helping out at the hackathons in Buenos Aires and India. Alexandra (of Parity) is the genius behind our logo, the design guidelines and the one who initially built the website.
By the beginning of June (proof of blog), they had gathered a team of 12–15 volunteers splitting up in groups and organizing hackers, mentors, judges, sponsors and volunteers.
Let’s go:
Mentors: Besides the hackers, the mentors may well be the biggest and most crucial group at the hackathon. Philip, during the day CTO at Centrifuge, is a software veteran and thus exactly the right guy to build great infrastructure for the hacker-mentor relationship during the hackathon. He joined blockchain because he’s fed up with the slow innovation in centralized and closed (enterprise) software systems. Philip is joined by Caspar, Berlin community lead for Brainbot. Caspar wants to make sure that the Ethereum community never leaves Berlin again. To him, it feels like a family and the family should stay close to home. Ok, at least, the family should come together for a reunion once a year: ETHBerlin.
Judges: Let’s be clear, after all the hackathon is a competition and many teams come to win! To distribute the incredible prize pool in a fair and transparent way, Lasse and Chris (both founding partners at 1kx, an open source software fund in Berlin) take care of all the judging happening on Sunday at ETHBerlin. They are in blockchain for the incentives, and the technology, the game theory, the psychology, and the sustainability. Fun fact: Lasse once spent way too much Bitcoin on a burger at Room 77.
Sponsors: First things first: the team’s friendships and connections in the community, as well as ETHGlobal’s four amazing past hackathons, have made this task much easier than it would have been otherwise. In the past couple of weeks, María Paula and I (Daniel) managed to onboard many of the best projects in the Ethereum space. I am in blockchain, as I believe this technology gives us another chance at solving the tragedy of the commons (especially climate change) at scale. Simon (see next) and I are building EarlyBlock, an early stage token fund channeling Germany’s old money to the best teams in the space.
Volunteers: Simon has taken on one of the hardest problems in the Ethereum space: efficient conference registration. To have everything run smoothly during the hackathon, Simon is coordinating a small army of volunteers. He’s the finance guy of the blockchain fund we are raising together and as such fascinated by the coordination power of decentralized markets.
Culture room: Chris (of Livepeer), Adeola (of Ost), Jennifer (of Web3 Foundation) and Stina (of Hangar1) are our creative directors organizing the culture room that will give all of us some immersion into Berlin’s bursting art scene, when people want to have a break from hacking. The ideas I have seen so far, are hinting towards an incredible creative escape.
Knowledge-base: Sina has been the latest addition to our team. Impressed by the openness of the community at Dappcon, he’s now the lucky guy having to make sense of all the ETHBerlin craziness and putting everything together in our knowledge base. So if you have questions, he’s the one with the highest probability of a good answer ;).
Gnosis and Factory: Last, but definitely not least, this team of organizers couldn’t pull all of this off if it weren’t for the amazing teams at Gnosis and Factory Berlin. Mareen and Anna-Lena of Gnosis are of incredible help with all the legal, tax and payments set-up needed. Also, at this point, a big big thank you to Friederike Ernst, Gnosis COO, for her incredible flexibility and support from the operational side of Gnosis.
We have been blessed with an incredible venue and event team from the venue itself too. Suia and her team at Factory Berlin are the best, most efficient and most flexible event organizers we have seen so far. Without their dedication and commitment to the ever growing blockchain space here in Berlin, this would never have evolved into the biggest Ethereum hackathon in Europe so far! Thank you!
I guess the message here is: if you want to organize something like ETHBerlin, define values, find like-minded people, just start and figure things out on the way. This bunch of people, which I will dub here as the ETHBerlin founding team, are held together by a common goal: onboard more people into the Ethereum ecosystem. By running the hackathon on as many Dapps as possible, projects will get lots of crucial user feedback, which helps us all to get one step closer to #massaDapption.
Finally, we cannot leave out the projects that are letting their people off the hook a bit to organize this hackathon. THANK YOU ALL! These include (in no particular order): Gnosis, Ost, 1kx, Centrifuge, Golem, AdEx, Web3, Parity, ETHGlobal, Brainbot, EarlyBlock, Factory, Ethereum Foundation, FullNode. This wouldn’t be possible without your support as well as the support from the amazing wider Ethereum community.
We can’t wait for you all to join us at ETHBerlin_v1, happening September 7th to 9th 2018.
Until then,
Daniel and the entire ETHBerlin team
