Kickback safety guide and call for dispute resolution system
Kickback brings financial incentives for event participants to only RSVP if they are serious about attending the event. This has so far worked with great success for many events achieving 80~90 % attendance rate when it usually only achieves 50%. Having said that we encountered a few cases where participants weren’t marked as attended even though participants went through the check-in process hence asking for a refund.
One thing people don’t realise is that all the commitment are held on the smart contract and there is no way we can pay back the commitment from the contract once “finalise” button is pressed so someone has to pay from their own pocket. So far event organisers kindly agreed to cover the loss of the fund of their participants but we would like to try our best to prevent from further accident happening and here is the guide line which we propose event organisers of Kickback to follow.
- Set a relatively restrictive cut-off time
If you let participants claim as long as people come to the event, then people just arrive a few minutes before the end of the event to claim for their portion which I observed multiple cases. Though it is a kind gesture of organisers to make the event more inclusive, this will make your event operation harder as you are less likely to have volunteers stay at the reception area for the entire duration. It is much easier to make it clear to have cut off time and it has a nice effect which drives participants to arrive on time. We tried this at “Dai breakfast club” during Berlin blockchain week and the effect was great. Our guided cut off time is 30 min ~ one hour after the start time of the event (for events with multiple dates like a hackathon, then it will be the end of the first night).
(NOTE: this also implies that Kickback is not appropriate for open events where you don’t mind anyone to come in until we create “self-check-in” feature).
2. Print out attendee list as a backup
One of the biggest uncertainties at your event is the stability of WIFI. Though we recommend using our website, it is recommended that you also print out the attendance list so that you can check-in people offline, and populate in our website later on in case of WIFI disaster.
3. Prepare to check-in via mobile phone.
As an admin, you have a privilege to check-in people from our web admin page. You usually bring your laptop but you will be in trouble if the WIFI at the venue is unstable. I recommend downloading Metamask mobile and import the Mnemonic of your desktop version so that you can check-in people from both Mobile and Desktop. Checking in people via mobile is great as you don’t need desk space to let people check-in and it works under 3G connection without WIFI. It is also important to ask all your check-in volunteers to do the same (and make sure to add them as Kickback admins ahead of the time).
4. Allow dispute period before pressing “finalise”
This is mostly my fault but I often get asked “When can I start withdrawing” hence I have finalised right at the end of the event a couple of times.
From now on, what I would suggest for a larger event (more than 50 people) is as follows.
4.1 After the cut off time, tweet or announce at the event to check participant that they are marked as check-in on our browser.
4.2 After the event is over email to the list of people who weren’t marked as attended to email back with the proof (eg: tweet they made from the event venue) and mark them as attended if the claim was genuine. We are working on automating the email notification process so that you don’t have to in future.
4.3 At least one day after the event is over, then you click “Finalise”
Suggestion for the better dispute resolutions?
All the above guides will work if organisers try their best to protect the commitment of users. What if organisers don’t care much, too busy during the events, or just malicious that they put fake events (or fake event pages of the real events) trying to steal the commitments of the participants? This is the reason Kickback still stays as a closed beta and only offer our platform to the trusted organisations. Also The step 4.2 can be easily gamed by participants once they think they can be marked as check-in as long as they complain to the organisers. For Kickback to go completely hands-free, we do need some sort of dispute resolution systems and we would like to try out solutions which are more decentralised and offloads our effort rather than us trying to hire many event admins. DAOs and decentralised court systems such as Aragon and Kleros are already usable for real use case so we will welcome any suggestions which we can try out during DevCon5.
