Designing Coherence: Aligning Ethereum Stakeholders Through Physical Environments

Transcript

Okay. Okay. Okay. Hi everyone. Hey. Uh my name is Dan and I'm going to talk about how physical environments influence the way we connect and why this is especially important within Ethereum. To give you a quick intro uh before Ethereum, I spent 15 years designing these temporary environments, different ones from underground parties to large-scale events film music.

Uh I did a lot of um experiential stuff and conferences. But then uh a friend of mine and my co-founder uh brought me to to a rave. And uh this was in uh Lisbon 20 uh 21. And uh I was amazed from what I seen. I saw smart, intelligent, open-minded people at a professionally run conference during the daytime.

And then I stumbled upon uh the same group in the evening. And uh what I discovered was that these two worlds can collide and I think this is like something special we have in within the ecosystem. And the energy felt different. It was the same people discussing the same things. But there it clicked. So I decided to build these environments intentionally and I spent five years uh designing uh Ethereum-focused events.

We established uh ETH Prague conference and uh Ethereum Zurich. And uh apart of that uh we've been working for teams, protocols and foundations around the globe uh setting up uh over a two dozens of events at uh different countries. But what is not important is the scale, it's how uh the rooms work. And we have also something special within Ethereum and that's we coexist within uh parallel worlds. It's a different people with different incentives who come from different backgrounds.

And uh these all these people come to to coordinate and build trust among each other. So uh as opposed to centralized organization when uh decisions are assigned and there's like hierarchy uh within Ethereum uh decisions have to be discovered. And alignment must emerge. So the problem with Ethereum is not the technology but uh the coordination.

And uh we all know this from uh our daily lives. We use all these uh tools that enable us to connect. But we end up overloaded with information and what we see at the best is digital interpretation of people with who we talk to. If it comes to written communication then these days we cannot even be sure that it was actually like written by the person who's sending it.

So there's uh high information and low alignment. The rooms actually compress coordination and trust. And this is especially important for what we do. Because if you shape the environment in the correct way then you achieve behavior that leads to a faster coordination and accelerates the whole ecosystem. So what works? It's uh mostly the shared experiences because these have capacity to to bind people together.

And uh the more unorthodox and unexpected experiences we create uh the better bonds among the people. Say a couple of years ago we went to a team building to to catacombs in in Paris. And this was uh especially difficult for for those of us uh who didn't like the confined spaces, but we spent eight hours there. And I'm absolutely sure that no one from the group will ever forget each other.

At uh Devconnect in Buenos Aires we open up the week with uh a tango performance which created context. And for for the locals it brought in pride of uh the heritage they have. And for everyone else it was context of of of the space because like we travel a lot to a different countries and uh the context is all we have. Otherwise all the experience would blur into each other.

We also do at ETH Prague creative workshops to form the teams ahead of the hackathons, some urban walks, sound baths. But you can do whatever you want and the intensity of the experience is what shapes and creates the bonds between people. Uh then it's also the contrast. And at ETH Prague you can go to uh dinner at the palace one day, but the other day you end up with uh a beer can being the cleanest thing in your head because you you uh are at a rave.

And this especially work because we come from different environments and uh switching between context does not just make uh the events memorable but it also uh makes the participant feel at home at some point. And uh when it comes to to the venues, and this is especially important. What we tend to do at Duct Tape is we tend to pick landmarks instead of uh convention spaces.

Because we want to create something unexpected. Say in uh Buenos Aires we did this event at uh Planetario Galileo Galilei. And we used the dome for projection, artistic projection of the team's vision. And this created a platform for for the ideas to really land. In Zurich it took us three years to get access to uh the main uh building in the historic city center, the building where Albert Einstein went to teach.

And this completely changed the way how uh people show up and uh the quality of the talks and everything. Uh next month uh we are staging uh ETH Prague at this uh UNESCO grade Art Nouveau building in the heart of the city where I'm from, Prague. And uh what we going to do we going to place the hackathon inside the main concert hall. And we going to let people to to stay overnight, something which has never happened uh in the 100 plus years history of the space.

Also uh it's very important how we pick the people to attend because uh you don't curate uh guest list, you create the the outcomes. And uh a couple of examples what we achieved uh once we staged this like weird uh contrast high contrast event uh within different uh environments. And we invited a journalist from CNBC. Uh the next thing we know, we are live in the CNBC network. And we have a feature article on the main page.

Also yes uh last year we invited uh uh regulator, uh EU parliament member to to ETH Prague. And uh the co-author of MiCA. And uh last uh yesterday at this very event it was unveiled that uh the person founded uh um European Ethereum Institute to promote uh the technology as a infrastructure for for the EU. So uh in a down market situation like this uh I get the reasoning like why why to cut down on events. They are expensive hard to measure, sometimes they don't scale.

But it's important to to understand that a part of the technology Ethereum is human. And uh when blockchains coordinate machines, it's at the actual environments that coordinate humans. Thank you. Enjoy the lunch.