Six characters you will face when using BlockParty at your hackathon

Crosstown doughnuts with ENS logo toppers

Introduction

Back in 2012, I organised a hackathon themed around London Olympics called “Londinium MMXII Hackathon”. We booked a venue in central London for two days costing around £2500 expecting 50 people but had only 15 turn ups.

Moo card used to be hip back then

I sense the feel of desperation on this tweet

I had lots of fun during the hackathon but at the same time I was quite disappointed when there was so much food waste (and also I could have booked a lot smaller venue).

Some people tend to think that free event (= £0) means that anyone is entitled to attend or not to attend(= freedom) but tend to forget the cost involved. Organising a weekend hackathon would probably cost minimum of £50 per person and it will become a huge disappointment to sponsors and those who support the event if more than half of people who registered don’t turn up (in my previous case, the actual cost per attended person jumped from £50 to £166). BlockParty is one way to have some financial discipline among participants.

5 years later, I had a chance to organise another hackathon themed around insurance and blockchain in the summer of 2017. I wanted to use BlockParty at the event but we decided to simply charge £10 because majority of insurers didn’t have ETH. The majority of people did turn up but there were some sentiments against charging to hackathon participants when they are spending their precious weekend hacking for the theme of your interests (to reward their effort, we had pretty big financial rewards as prizes).

1 year later at ENS hackathon, I finally had a chance to tackle this issue using BlockParty. I think the event was a great success with only 3 no shows out of 32 RSVP via BlockParty (you can read this post to see how the actual event went)

However, using blockchain and smart contract for daily events is new to many people so you do need special TLC. In this blog post, I will describe how to handle 6 different characters who you would encounter when you use BlockParty on your own event.

• The skeptics
• The newbies
• The indecisives
• The late comers
• The bad actors
• The lazy ones (or just simply forget)

The skeptics

I’ve had resistance on other events where people were reluctant to put their precious ETH. It was worse in his case because the gas price was very high when he registered BlockParty for my local event a month ago and he ended up paying over 70gwei for the gas price which ended up failing due to hitting gas limit(leading to losing around $2).

After some patient debate on twitter, his anger turned from “why Blockparty” to more constructive criticism such as “BlockParty has lots of horrible features which needs to be improved” and in fact made lots of good suggestions on our github issues.

The newbies

One of the side benefits of using BlockParty for blockchain related events is that it naturally filters out people who have no experience interacting with Dapps so that you can only attract more experienced participants (or at least people who are eager to learn to get their spot) . One of the most common mistakes people make (leading to the failed transactions )is to just send a deposit to the smart contract address itself rather than interacting with the Dapp interface. It is quite easy to find out such transactions because their input data tend to be empty.

This is when people try to send ETH directly to the contract (sometimes from exchanges)

This is when people interacted via Dapp. You can see the twitter address of participants.

There was one person who claimed that he tried to register 3 days before the deadline but his transaction kept pending. This is no surprising as it has in the past. It usually happens when people put too low gasprice when the gas price was suddenly becomes too high (BlockParty takes the average gas price from https://ethgasstation.info but it may not always accurate). Simply sending another transaction with higher gas price does not solve the situation as it will waits until the earlier transaction goes through. You have to replace the pending transaction with the same nonce number. Some wallets (such as Metamask) supports it as part of its UI but not all wallets may support.

Metamask allow you to replace your transaction with higher gas price

The indecisives

One of the bad side effect of using BlockParty is that people tend to wait RSVP until the last minute or events shows the sign of becoming full.

We initially tried to incentivise people by offering ENS T-shirts for early sign ups but that only lead to having a few extra signups. What it really did work was FOMO tactics by simply declaring that we close registration a week earlier (which I really had to do to finalise the catering amount and number of T-shirts to order).

About 30% of the participants in fact signed up on the day of the deadline.

BlockParty actually have no notion of “deadline” so what I did was decrease the number of capacity down to the number of currently registered participants so that no one can register anymore.

The late comers

I expected that some people try to be get into the event even after the deadline. For those people, I simply told them that we will let them know once we know any extra spots.

I was initially reluctant to put too many people because the venue had no A/C. However, the weather cooled down a lot a few days prior to the event so I eventually allowed all people who were in the wait list (5 of them) event though I mentioned that we have limited T-shirts and food order so they have to respect that.

The bad actors

Most popular events tend to attract crashers who try to get in without tickets, or try to go through back doors by directly contacting organisers(you). I met three people who asked me to let them in during the pre hackathon social event on Friday. One person insisted that he should be able to get in because 1) he thought the ticket to this social event allowed him to get into the hackathon, and 2) he came all the way from Italy. I had a long conversation with him that the event was really full. All of them in the end respected my decision and they did not turn up to the hackathon.

However, there was one person who came to the hackathon on Saturday noon jokingly saying that “I just eat lunch, have a chat with my friends and leave because I have to go to some other event” and he actually just did that! That really enraged me because if he had told me that he wouldn’t be coming earlier, I could have let in one of the three people I met a night before (and even worse, the Italian guy who I did argue was his own friend).

I could have had a stricter rule (or automate with smartcontract) that people had to stay till the end. However, some people could become sick during hackathon or failed to be part of a team (or simply they did not enjoy the first day of the hackathon). I didn’t want to force them to come back on Sunday just so that they can collect their deposits. I could have also asked all participants if we should count him as attended (aka voting) but RicMoo later pointed out that people are less likely to make a harsher decision (aka kick him/her out) in front of everybody. Would anonymous on chain voting have helped? I don’t know as blockparty has incentive for everybody to vote against such person so that their cut will increase.

The lazy ones (or simply forget)

One of the rules people tend to forget is that participants have to withdraw their deposits once the event finishes.

People who are marked as “Won” have not withdrawn

I declared that people can withdraw deposits before the Hackathon pitch started on Sunday. 5 days have passed since and still more than 30 % of people have not withdrawn their deposit yet . The smart contract defines that the contract owner (me) can take all the deposit after cooling period (default is set to 7 days) yet 10% of people on average don’t withdraw within the cooling period (the longest people haven’t withdrawn was over 9 months when ETH price went from $10 to $200). It is often debatable what to do with the money.

We could either send to charity, tip to the organisers or send back to the participants with some sort of fee (or people can choose). I have made more detailed explanation here before.

Summary

In this blog post, I have described six different ways people behave at your meetup when you use BlockParty. Some challenges could be the limitation of BlockParty (which we try to improve) but other challenges come down to event organisers to solve. If your organisation lacks discipline, then there are so much smart contract can help.

The next “BlockParty enabled” event will be limited spots to ETHBerlin pre hackathon events.

If you liked it then you shoulda put a dApp on it

I am curious how they will face with these people but I am sure that they are a lot tougher than me.