INHUMANE: ETHBerlin’s culture & values
I guess if you’ve followed the Tower of Babel of a hackathon that ETHBerlin is until now, you might as well figure what I will write about.
We work long and hard, on top of full-time jobs (thanks to the teams putting up with us, once again), to make this hackathon happen. And organically, the collective has begun to set its own values & culture. As we are coming closer to the event itself, we are also facing the fact that inadvertedly, this has escalated. From a simple hackathon born in a banter session to what ETHBerlin is today, we’ve come a long way. And we are already making plans for the future of our organization. Yep, you read right. If we succeed on this first try, we will become an organization and will set up operations for local community support, and future iterations of our event.
Of course, every organization has its culture. We’ve seen Aragon’s manifesto, Status’ culture formation, and dialogues, Gnosis reaffirming convictions, and ETHGlobal’s intentions, to name a few. And like Berlin’s ours is extremely flexible yet strong, diverse yet condensed.
Throughout its history, Berlin has seen it all — the good, the bad, and the godforsaken extremely horrible. But it still stands, as a city so varied, diverse and multicultural — and above all — inhumane.
I’d like to note here, that I am avoiding the use of the word human because even if it has a positive connotation, and I am well aware that humanity IS made of both heinous and great individuals, groups and societies.
Inhuman acts, as people like to call them, are not inhuman at all. AFAIK, I’ve never met an animal able to carry out a mass genocide or to persecute people because of their sexual orientation. So I think we’re better off with calling ourselves inhuman, history backing me up, we know humans can be many things, including evil.
That said, ETHBerlin as the collective of individuals it is, stands strong for certain values, and those will translate into our event, and our future:
Community first: seriously, don’t waste it. Everyone gets to apply the same way, gets evaluated the same way, and no, you cannot get a lightweight vest and pretend you’re there to focus on the code and come network. If you reach us out, come with a proposal. Ask us what you can do to help. But don’t try to namedrop your way or get recommended to skip a step or two. Help us help you, and be nice and collaborative. There’s love for everyone that gets this, and for the rest, well there are plenty of pseudo-crypto conferences for you to promote your agenda.
Our commitment to the space: We want to see more people committed to achieving excellence in tech, to creating social value and using this technology to address big societal problems, to start and kick off conversations about the great challenges of our time. ETHBerlin for us is not only about diversity and inclusion but especially about reminding ourselves that we are in this to address some of the 21 century’s biggest challenges. And work on helping out institutions. We have long and hard stated our commitment to open source tech in this blogpost and this one, and there’s more to come, so this post is aimed to focus more on the individuals behind the tech.
Inclusion, diversity, and respect: your gender and sexual orientation, in the context of this hackathon, do not matter at all. However, back to the context of Berlin, we are queer. Period (yeah I know for some I’m a cis female that shouldn’t have an opinion on this- whatever, I have an opinion). Our friends at OST are championing efforts for LGBTQ inclusion in the Blockchain ecosystem in Berlin. We stand with them and would like to bring peace of mind that at ETHBerlin, you can be whoever you are.
Women in Blockchain: no. We are all equal. What’s my womanly credential, anyways? We do need more gender variation in Blockchain, but gender is not only male and female. So let’s hope for equality of all genders, and not classify any of them. By the way, our team has a 60% female leadership which we didn’t seek for, it just happened, we just started working together. And no, there is no room for feeling threatened. We will make sure everyone is safe, regardless of their gender.
No tech hierarchy- yet development and code prevail: hey — not all of us discovered Bitcoin in 2008. Some had troubles that prevented them from nerding out in front of the computer, some didn’t have any interest. We weren’t also all “in blockchain before it was cool”. At ETHBerlin, we don’t care if you still say “Etherium” instead of Ethereum. We don’t care about your years of experience coding. If you want it, and you can put some serious work, you have a spot here. Actually, some of our best collaborators are just dipping their toes in this ecosystem, and have done more than many. We love newbies, we need users, we care about mass aDapption, not about your qualifications.
Empowerment: same as the last point. Some of us have also felt we weren’t tech enough — some of us have been told that as if it was some kind of stigma, some missing qualification that didn’t allow us to get the position or the salary we wanted, in spite of years of work in the scope, just not in tech. Yeah, well look at us now. We are building: a community, an organization, a platform for mass aDapption, a hackathon. So we want others to thrive too. Do you have great capacities and ideas? Well, we give you the platform, you will have our support to act to the best of your knowledge, without authority, but based on the consensus of your peers.
Sexual and religious freedom: having looked at the applications, we are set for a beautiful multi-cultural event. We would like to highlight that above all. It is no secret that our event will have a panel that includes sex workers and how they are cutting the middleman via crypto. We feel Berlin, a city known for sexual freedom, is the perfect scenario for this. However, we understand that this and other aspects from the event might hurt some sensitivities — we are all so different! We will notify you of these cases and you will be able to find other options that will make you feel more comfortable.
We are building the future, but we need to have fun: we do take code seriously, and breathe and live dApps. However, we understand that if we are building the decentralized future, we need to enjoy the process and not take ourselves too seriously. Keeping grounded, a clear mind and our goals aligned, while releasing tensions through humor, is ETHBerlin’s perfect formula.
We build for you: if you feel uncomfortable, misrepresented, or simply off, let us know. We are building this for you, and only with feedback, we will grow better, more tolerant, and more inclusive.
Well, that’s all. Now you just gotta wait and see what we have in stock. In the meantime, we’ll continue our work. Have a question or a comment? Please reach out, here’s my Status contract code, let’s chat!
Special MP thanks: to our team at Golem, that is building hard towards mass aDapption, with real code, fixing real issues, and providing solutions. I just banter.
ETHBerlin is committed to inclusion, diversity, education, and above all, to the Ethereum Community improvement. We will not sell any tickets for this event.
Some tickets will be available for free for things such as Day 1: conferences, or the Day 2 workshops. We will release separate applications in due time.
ETHBerlin would like to thank the incredible support of ETHGlobal and Factory Berlin.
