DevCon4 social event planning guide
Introduction
Are you planning social events around DevCon4?
Given the popularity of the ticket sale, I am sure that DevCon4 will have a lot of satellite events, not only for the event participants, but also for people who couldn’t get tickets. It will be a great opportunity to organise events to promote your organisation or products — but the competition will be fierce!
Last year, I created a very simple site and shared a Google calendar of events around DevCon3. It started off with 10 events, but ended up listing 36 events. I will share some of my tips based on the last year’s experience (plus other crypto events) so that you can stay ahead of the rest.
Tip1: Location, Location, Location
There will be lots of crypto visitors in town and they tend to be a bit clueless. If you pick some restaurants/pubs right next to the DevCon venue, people may flood into the events. You may think it is a success, but overcrowded space is actually quite unpleasant. Make sure you have a dedicated space to secure enough room for your guests.
Unlike last year in Cancun — where many bars and restaurants were packed in the small tourist area — Prague is spread into different areas and there are lots of nice bars and restaurants within easy Uber distance. I went to Prague back in June for DAPP UX & adoption unconf and the town was relatively easy to navigate for foreigners like me.
Josef Jelacic , the organiser of the unconf, tweeted a quick location guide of the area and shared a google map pinpointing various venues you could use.
Tip2: Make sure that start / end time is correct.
You may think this is common sense, but when I was receiving requests, people shared a calendar with incorrect times because they did not take time zone into account (especially if you are reusing your local meetup.com site).
Also be aware that the summertime ends on Sunday, 28 October, a few days before DevCon4 starts.
Tip3: Mobile Wallet + Tokens = Crypto Swags!!
During DevCon3, mobile wallets were still a novelty. Only a handful of mobile wallets like Inzhoop LETH and imToken were usable on mainnet. Now there are Coinbase Wallet, Trust Wallet, Status and many others which are operating on Mainnet. This means that you can do some cool things using Tokens.
During ETHBerlin, MakerDAO team gave away their stable token DAI as giveaways physical tokens. You could scan the address on the back of token with your mobile wallet and get free beers at bars — that was really really cool.
However, there was one caveat. Even if you get the token for free, you need ETH in your wallet to transfer the Token. One of my friends didn’t have a mobile wallet so he had to download status.im on the spot. (However, he also did not have any ETH in his wallet so he was not able to transfer the DAI token while he was in Berlin. FAIL!!)
For the majority of people, ETH is still just for HODLing and they keep it on their hardware wallet and are less likely to travel with it (for the obvious security concerns). If you are going to make use of any Dapps/Tokens during your event, make sure to announce early and remind people to bring their mobile phone with wallet installed with a bit of ETH.
Tip 4: ENS subdomain as affordable swag!
Here is another swag idea. ENS (Ethereum Name Service) will turn a long Ethereum address into an easily readable name. During the ENS hackathon I organised, we gave away custom ENS T-shirts and our participants loved it.
You don’t have a budget to print T-shirts for each guest? That’s understandable. How about just give away ENS subdomains?
Getting ENS domain requires five days complex auctioning process but any owner of ENS can issue subdomain (eg: ricmboo.firefly.eth). Giving away subdomain (eg: username.yourensdomain.eth) is probably the cheapest swag you can give away if your budget is a bit tight. In addition, if the user actually uses your branded ens subdomain, it’s like giving away Hotmail or Gmail — a great way to let users promote your brand!
Here is another caveat (again? 😡). As I mentioned earlier, probably people don’t bring mobile wallets (unless they are reminded) and they won’t remember their ETH address (a bit of chicken and egg situation of ENS adoption). So how do you issue a subdomain to these people? Keep reading.
Tip 5: Submit your event at pragueblockchainweek.cz
Location ✅ Time ✅ Cool dapp/token swag✅, so now it’s time to promote your event. I was initially thinking about opening up my google calendar but there is a lot better one this year. Please allow me to introduce you to ….
This is set up by the mighty Josef Jelacic , super tall and kind digital nomad who is always traveling around the world.
As of writing this article there are already 14 events listed. (I predict that 31st of October will be the the most competitive day due to Halloween). Don’t leave the submission until DevCon4 actually starts. If you wait too long, chances are that your event never gets listed because Josef will be super busy.
If you haven’t decided the venue yet, you may just want to decide the time and use google form to capture interests so that you can send invitations later on.
The final tip: Use Kickback (formerly known as BlockParty) to make sure people come to your event😉
You want people to choose your event over others, but they are more likely to RSVP any free events available and then pick the one on the day.
If you want to make sure that you have enough guests turn up, consider using Kickback, where Everyone deposits a small amount of ETH when they RSVP, which is refunded after the event check-in. Any no-shows lose their deposit, which then is split amongst the attendees.
For those thinking about giving away some crypto swag or doing some blockchain based games, here is the good news:because Kickback is an event registration app, you know everybody’s ETH address in advance.
In addition, your participants are guaranteed to know how to interact with the Dapp (otherwise they can’t RSVP your event!) so you don’t need to spend hours on-boarding newbies how to use wallet, etc.
If you are interested in trying out Kickback to stand out from the pack, please read the more detailed blog post below and request early access here or email us at hello@kickback.events
Your event is not for Kickback but still want to pick our brain? Sure, no problem. Just say hi at our dedicated DevCon4 chat channel.
