Unconferences + Quadratic Voting: How ETHBoulder Coordinates Itself

Transcript

Who knows unconferences? Quadratic voting?

Okay, GM everyone. >> Um, just by a quick show of hands, who here is familiar with the idea of an unconference, maybe even participated in one before? Amazing. Okay, we're practicing our decentralization here. And what about quadratic voting? Who's familiar with that? Okay, nice. We got some mechanism nerds in the house. So, basically what we've created for ETH Boulder um is an integration of these two ideas. Um an unconference being where anyone can propose a session um and the event is really created by its participants rather than by the organizers. And we're doing a little bit of a hybrid of uh you know for the general forum on Ethereum localism.

Hybrid model: scheduled + participant-created sessions

That's a particular format. Here we're a little bit of a hybrid. So, we have some sessions that have been pres-scheduled by the organizers. We've brought in some amazing artists. Shout out Renee for bringing in a ton of amazing artists. And it's going to be a robot battle tomorrow night that just got put up on the schedule. Um, and then we have all we have a number of slots that are available for all of you to to propose sessions. And thank you to everyone who's already put a session up in the system. And what we're basically going to do, um, I'll show you how the app works in a minute, but I'm just going to explain the general principles over the course of today, um, we want people to be submitting their sessions, voting on their sessions. Um, quadratic voting

How quadratic voting determines top sessions

allows you to express your relative preference. And so, as organizers towards the end of today, um, we're going to look at all of the votes, look at all of the slots. um when you propose a session, if you've proposed one already, we admittedly added a feature last night where you can propose when you would like to do it so that you don't get scheduled in a time you're not available. Um and so if you haven't done that, please indicate your preferences on your session. Um and then we're going to try to fill in all of the unconference sessions with the top voted sessions based on availability. And so that creates there's a little bit of artificial scarcity, but also real scarcity. there's only so much time in

Artificial scarcity & collective intelligence

the day. There's only so many venue spaces we can use. And so we're hoping that the collective intelligence of this group voting on the sessions that you like will surface the the sessions that are actually the most interesting that we should be talking about. Um, but we don't want to just limit it to what we have physical space for because this event is all about forking Boulder itself. And so inside of the app, there's an option to self-host, which means that you're not going to be at an official venue. Um, but it means that you have total permission to put up on the schedule anything that you want to see happen. And you can use that as a way to invite people to participate in something that you care about. So, if

Forking ETHBoulder: self-hosted sessions explained

you're self-hosting, I would suggest pick a cafe, pick a restaurant, um, pick a bar, um, put that address in the session details. Um, and then people will be able to find you for that conversation. So, um, let me just walk you through a little bit of how this actually works. So, um, once you've logged in, um, you're going to create your account. Um, and then you can propose a session here, and you can select which type the session is, how long it is, what your preferences are for when you'd like it to be. Um, any tracks you want to associate it with.

How to propose a session in the app

You don't have to associate it with a track if you don't want, and if you would like it to be considered to be scheduled in the official venue, click that, and then add your tags and submit. Um, and then there's a a brief approval process just to make sure we don't get any spammers who are adding things who are not part of the actual IRL group. Um, and then once that session has been approved, you'll see it here in the sessions list. Um, and you can filter here um, by session, by track, um, sessions that have been proposed but not scheduled. And then right here in the interface, you can add your votes um, and the votes save automatically.

there's no need to submit. Um, and you can also, the heart is distinct from the vote. The heart will just add this to your schedule. Um, so you can keep tabs on the events that you want to attend. Um, and then you can also view the full schedule here. Um, some of the cool things that we're experimenting with. Um, let's go to Kevin's session here. um you're able to edit your session and so um we're going to send out an email this evening determining when we know what uh the official times are for the unconference sessions. Um if your session didn't do well enough in

Voting interface & schedule management

the votes to get an official placement, you're going to have the option to edit the event here and switch it over to self-hosted, which means that no one's blocking you from hosting it just cuz we don't have space in the official venue. Um, you are welcome to to fork this event as you see fit. Um, and then we're also doing some some interesting things here with um, as an admin of your event, you can add a Telegram group if you want to follow up with people. This Telegram group will be a public link once you've linked it um, so that people in your session can easily follow up with each other. Um, you can view participants here if you want to catch up with someone.

Switching to self-hosted if not selected

definitely encourage you when you're creating your profile. Oh, okay. Vive coding. Um, uh, in your profile, definitely encourage you to link your ENS um, for a fun surprise um, and and use that as a way to to stay connected with each other. And the last thing that I I want to share is that we're really excited to be working with Bonfires AI and they're going to come up and share a little bit more later about how um we're working with them. Um but I just want to make everyone aware that we are going to have a knowledge graph associated with this event. They're going to explain more how that works. Um, but throughout the event, um, if you want to add something

Telegram groups & participant follow-up

to the graph, um, just click on this button inside of your event dashboard or your event page. Um, and that's going to bring you to a DM with a bot that is basically sucking up all of the knowledge and insights. and um they'll show more about how that works. But one thing at a kind of event logistics level, it's really important that we ask for consent before recording. And so this is the one of the first decentralized governance challenges that you might encounter during ETH Boulder.

ENS integration & identity

What happens if you're in a session and someone says, "Hey, can we record?" And one or two people out of five say no. What do you do? How do you practice consent-based governance when there's two different paths? So you could fork, you could decide together through consensus, through consent. Those people could leave. There's no actual one way to do it. It could be slightly awkward, but use your best decentralized governance skills uh to figure out how to navigate getting consent because if you do record, we're going to add this to a knowledge graph that throughout the event, you'll be able to see in real time the collective intelligence of this group starting to form in this graph database. And so we'll share more about that later, but definitely um as you're

Bonfires AI knowledge graph overview

hosting sessions, participating in sessions, think about recording, think about how we might ingest this so that this event isn't just a flash in the pan. There's actually a kind of long ar longer arc of what is possible when we bring this many literal geniuses together in one place. Um yeah, keep an eye on the schedule. We we're going to continue to be updating it and pushing things. Um, if you go to your dashboard, you can see the per top performing sessions, the latest sessions. Um, this is definitely intended to be a live part of the event.

Consent-based governance & recording ethics

So, um, use it to to stay a breast of new sessions that might be added. Um, really strong provocation here is if you're having a really fascinating conversation with someone over lunch and you're like, "Wow, I I bet other people would be really interested to have this conversation with us." use those moments of like genuine inspiration and connection um to as the kind of source point of creating new sessions um because we want this event to really emerge from what people are passionate about what they want to explore. Um so we've created this app as a kind of working prototype of how unconferences and quadratic voting could work together. There will probably be bugs.

Live dashboard & emerging sessions

please share them on the there's a telegram channel for bugs um inside of the main public chat and it's just been so fun to already watch um these 87 sessions start to come in and people actually start to use it. So um excited to see what you all do with it. Um and if you have any questions please let me know.