###### tags: `Meeting Notes`

# ETHBERLIN DEBRIEF 2022-09-27 / Core Team Meeting

Let's use this doc to collect all things that went well, didn't go well and ideas for improvements for next time while our memories are still fresh!

## Open Tasks
- [ ] Pay all bills :money_with_wings:
- [ ] Finally get Kraken account :octopus:
- [ ] Write winners / recap blog post for blog.ethberlin.ooo :writing_hand:
- [ ] Get ethberlin.com domain
- [ ] Get ethberlin.org domain
- [ ] Structure all pages from old events under one domain with /2018 /2019 etc.
- [ ] Make new one-pager website for Department of Decentralization
- [ ] Add winners and photos to the ethberlin.ooo website

## What went well?
- Food: The food was outstanding
- Security: Security had almost no complaints and a few ideas for improvement for next time. Security was way nicer to attendees than in 2019.
- for next year: book them +1 hour before doors, +1 hour after doors
- Volunteers: A good part of the volunteers were amazing and did more than expected of them.
- Self-hosting / FOSS: using [matrix] & cryptpad & helpq & ghost was great dogfooding
- Entertainment: music & cinema was appreciated
- Manifesto <3

## What could be better next time?
- EtherCards: Private key should be easier to get (import from seed phrase had suboptimal UX)
- either have a small tool to get the private key from seed or have a card with private key only (no need for seed in first place)
- Venue: The door system of Factory seriously needs fixing
- Matrix: Having onboarding docs for Matrix would help (Kaan)
- also invite links: https://github.com/vector-im/element-meta/discussions/574
- Food: Small thing but 🌶️ chili-sin-carne as midnight snack was not a good idea (Kaan)
- CryptDrive: prevent data-loss
- Stage decoration: We should think about cool stage decoration in time. The `3` worked well but it was stressful to create it and could have looked even better with more time
- Tools: Go full open-source next time? (prepare tools and expectations better)
- Find open-source tool for powering the judging process
- Find social network alternatives to cross-post to
- Find alternative to GitHub or cross-post (using Radicle?)
- Communication with participants via e-mail: One more email for all ticket holders with all info before registration opens
- E-Mails: Use better TLD and mailserver to not land in spam inbox (.ooo didn't work well)
- Participants: Keep hacker to other participants ratio healthy

## Feedback / Debrief per Workstream

### Registration
*Good:*
- Pre-registration was a big success!
- Ticketing system really helped with the pace of the registration

*To be improved:*
- Security had some issues with turning people who didn't have tickets away, they said it might be better if the rejection comes from us. We can put a volunteer at the entrance next time to support security with this
- however, we always had people at registration, this was only an issue on sunday after the registration closed
- Bottleneck 4PM - 7PM, next time two desks instead of 1?
- Idea from security: Next time official registration thru creators lab?
- Next time have overlap between pre-registration and registration
- Officially close registration at some point (e.g. have official closing hours of registration at 11PM)? Maybe put a Matrix handle or a way to reach someone to check people in.

### General / Legal (Afri, Raul)
*Good:*
- Legal templates were amazing (Thanks Raul & just)

*To be improved:*

### Core Planning (Franzi, Afri)
*Good:*
*To be improved:*
- CryptDrive corruption? (didn't really follow how we resolved) (Kaan)
- we were able to recover the two corrupted documents
- the main issue was it took some time to figure out how

### Hackathon Experience (Afri, Franzi)
*Good:*
*To be improved:*
- Communications with hackers on how the process works (submissions, pitching) not only on the website, but also on matrix, email etc. (maybe also include it in the opening ceremony)
- How's the project count & quality compared to last years? (Kaan)
- ~~99~~ 100 this year vs 88 last year
- https://ethberlin.devfolio.co/projects
- high quality, many OGs hacking
- Hacker manual could be more consise to things that are actually important, e.g. how to submit a project
- Devfolio
- many UX issues, already had feedback call with the team
- some projects were submitted as side-projects (super confusing)
- interface does not give feedback on required fields, a couple of projects missed the deadline
- cover image bug (still unresolved)
- Help desks were not recognized, volunteers were bored
- hackers asked questions at registration and swag station
- maybe make one huge visible helpdesk downstairs
- Next time: One central help desk next to the swag station? (2 volunteers there)

### Content: Talks & Workshop Curation (Franzi, Helena, Afri)
*Good:*
- Chelsea Manning & Alec Empire on stage
- no product talks :heavy_check_mark:

*To be improved:*
- Sometimes Lexis was too noisy because of people talking in the back (Kaan)
- Creator's Lab felt too seperate and away from the rest of the venue (Kaan)
- Have winning projects pitch their project more properly (i.e. demo). That requires they know about it at least a little bit in advance, which means we need to have a bigger time gap between end of judging and beginning of closing ceremony (caspar)
- honestly, this was on purpose, we wanted to give hackers more time to hack
- we did not count in the severe technical issues we had with devfolio which took them more than one hour to give us a CSV export

### Design (Hany)
*Good:*
- 🔥
- We really had a good story to tell and I think that helped a lot. We should keep the theme based design process (Bauhaus, Cypherpunk etc.). It was also a lot of fun despite the tight schedule (Kaan).
- Profile picture overlays

*To be improved:*
- Plan things more in advance and have transparency for everybody involved on what is needed when (we could solve this with having a weekly plan on what design stuff is needed etc.)
- I agree, for next year, we can should define deadlines for deliverables backwards, e.g., all print items X-2 weeks, all swag X-4 weeks, etc.
- It would be good to have design assets in future that we can just apply everywhere
- in the end we had 2-3 different versions of the logo (spacing, glow)
- Figma seems not to be suitable for print (good for collab / brainstorming)

### Website (Kaan)
*Good:*
- (nich) I thought the website was amazing. Loved that it highlighted ongoing events and allowed separation between main schedule and "hacker extravaganza"
- The timing highlights on the schedule
- The retro design
- Github CI
- The website was a living document, it changed over time (and hopefully will)
- let's put up winning projects/judge scores and photos in the coming weeks

*To be improved:*
- We supported static website initially but couldn't follow up. Nice if it works without JS next time.
- This is up for debate, many of the outstanding features were actually JS powered and there are really no alteratives
- Next time: State machine for hackers?

### Sponsors (Raul, Afri)
*Good:*
- Closed deals ahead of schedule
- Did not give too many privileges (e.g., swag bags)
- Sponsors office hours and sponsor FAQ were very helpful (so I've heard from sponsors)
- CineBar was pretty nice
- We raised 580k and spent 550k (but we still get taxes back)

*To be improved:*
- it would be good to have a onsite team in charge of: pointing the tables/locations to sponsors, make sure they get their swag, overall comms with them in case of needs.
- Communicate sponsor deadlines more clearly
- No sponsor bounties in future, this was too chaotic
- what else can we do to make sponsorships attractive?
- Reduce the amount of different sponsorship tiers
- Judge and especially mentor tickets for sponsors did not work out
- we should think about how we make the sponsorship tiers more attractive (aka. maybe we give a few more tickets for some tiers)
- Make it EXTRA clear what sponsors are entitled to and what not (e.g. "distribution of swag" does not mean a desk, does not mean we put it into the bag etc.)
- Some sponsor booths were not placed nicely, make sure they all have a similarly nice place (but it was mitigated and all well in the end)
- Popcorn machine :popcorn:

### Community & Communications (Helena, Eylon)
*Good:*
- Twitter following grew significantly
- Nice threads on past winners/sponsors etc
- Some people did appreciate the memes

*To be improved:*
- Was a bit hard to get super loud without the branding ready early
- the politician memes were not appreciated by everyone
- Need to connect our meme strategy with the event better
- website and twitter spoke a different "language"

### Swag (Carl)
*Good:*
- Crop tops (especially the covered shoulder ones) were a massive hit -> need more next time
- cropped shirts: we should have had this idea earlier!
- Yellow paper was a massive hit
- Bottles were requested a lot after they ran out.
- Volunteer numbers were adequate. Some downtime in-between but generally not too few, not too many.
- High quality over quantity was a good approach

*To be improved:*
- Reserve swag + stickers for the core team next time (Kaan +1)(+1 Franzi)
- also: 1000 stickers are not enough!
- Separate storage room with easy access is needed. Especially early on, the swag station was pretty messy due to all the boxes.
- Runner(s) to constantly refill individual items from boxes in a backroom would be optimal.
- More setup time is needed (sizes must be pre-sorted). Only few volunteers came to pick up their swag when the announcement was made before opening - Swag team needs to communicate better.
- idea: self-service swag station for core/volunteer in staff room (e.g., 100 pieces)
- Check-in for swag did not really help. If the sizes were shown, we could distribute only the ordered size and type per ticket, but I would propose to refrain from using the check-in system entirely and just provide adequate numbers.
- **Too few S and XL T-shirt sizes.**
- ligi: please export final requested sizes that we can use for next year for better estimates
- Items should be handed out individually, not packaged. Many rejections came from people not wanting to throw away an entire bag but really wanted e.g. the yellow paper.
- Swag station and check-in could be combined. We had many requests for further wristbands or lanyards.
- Franzi: There are no further wristbands or lanyards for people who made it into the venue, so this should be kept separate imo. Also since otherwise the queue for registration will be even bigger/ slower and crowd accumulates at one spot.
- Not sure what happened to the power banks.
- Franzi: Were successfully handed out to volunteers. :heavy_check_mark:
- If swag station is set up in the "middle", volunteers need to know more about the event ongoings. Many questions about the event were just directed at swag station because we were there and often could not be answered.
- Franzi: Good point! We should have schedule and room distribution info docs there (which we had for volunteers at the hacker help desks)
- consider putting swag station in the courtyard behind creators' lab next year (assuming all registration is there)

### Experiences Curation (Helena, Eylon, Jacob)
*Good:*
- (nich) the escape room was awesome
- treasure hunt too
- Zen den was super appreciated

*To be improved:*
- Experiences were planned/finalized a bit last minute this year. Might be nice to have an additional owner who has more time to dedicate to the experiences next year?
- prevent treasure hunt from going into silent/relaxation rooms

### Volunteers (Rose, Loie)
*Good:*
- The volunteers really appreciated the small gift
- The volunteers all seemed super nice, as per usual. Great selection of people!
- Sat & Sunday easy flow in general, had more volunteers than needed
- Communication on Telegram went well.
- volunteers jumped in quickly when needed
- We got easily a few more to fill the last shifts

*To be improved:*
- It would be good to know in advance which volunteers will be working with each person (i.e: at registration desk) to communicate beforehand.
- Roles need to be described more clearly, volunteers need to be briefed better for some positions
- Prio between different roles should be clear (e.g. registration and judging are crucial, hacker help desks not etc.)
- Swag and registration should be separate shifts
- Need more volunteers for setup
- Need min. one volunteer in each room with livestream/talks to protect cameras and keep noise levels low at the door
- If we plan a venue tour with all volunteers, please do it the day before not during setup/swag
- Weight the volunteers much heavier towards beginning of event. We had 11 people on shift before doors opened, could have been 25.
- Plan food for day 1. Not feeding people during long working hours was an issue.
- Shift assignments changing: Plan for 10% dropout rate. Insist volunteers organize *with each other* to switch any shifts that conflict with their schedule. (If tg handles are in shift sheet, this is doable)
- We had volunteers scheduled for areas that were not open yet (culture room Saturday & Sunday morning, information centers upper floors on Friday)
- Feedback from volunteers: Some shifts should be shorter (Information centers, because position alone in hallway), while others are ok to be longer (registration, because with others)
- Have leads prepared to give mini orientation to the job at every shift change time (or at least Fri & Sat)
- have volunteer orientation include registration, getting swag & volunteer shirt, & meeting the lead who will orient them to their shift

### Mentors (Anna, Caspar, Kirill)
*Good:*
- (caspar) Overall I would say it worked well. After a while it really became a self-carrying system. Not much management needed. Initially a bit of manual match making but then mentors got the gist of it and managed themselves.
- (caspar) Mentor briefing after the opening ceremony was really helpful to help onboard anyone that hadn't been following email instructions and generally set the tone and expectations for the event.
- (caspar) Handing out a one-pager at (physical) registration helped spread the word about mentor briefing and get the most important information out there one more time.
- (caspar) helpdesk tool is simple, but works.
- (caspar) Kirill was a superstar. (+1 Franzi)

*To be improved:*
- (caspar) push notifications for tickets?
- (caspar) mentor briefing in an easier to find
- (caspar) sign up process to helpdesk tool: only github/twitter signup means that we had to manually cross-check names / email addresses to assign mentor rights. Instead it would be better to create user accounts for mentors usign their email addresses provided during signup (+ give them rights immediately) and let them change the password.
- (caspar) mentor-only matrix chat needed manual adding/removing. Either just deal with it (it wasn't too bad) or collect handles in sign-up process (which creates barrier to signup).
- (caspar) During sign-up don't admit too many mentors in the first batch. A lot of "superstar" mentors will register late (caveat: superstar on paper often doesn't translate whatsoever to actualy mentoring, see point below)
- (caspar) "superstar" mentors on paper tend to not do anything at all. They use it as means to get a ticket to the event without having to do anything. Hard to distinguish apriori and I think hard to prevent. Maybe one just needs to accept it. Afterall we still want these people around?
- Franzi: Good point. I think we should not give people like Dean a mentor ticket next time anymore. He only showed up for 1 or 2 hours on Saturday and definitely didn't mentor anybody in this time
- funnily enough I was thinking of him when writing down this point
- and I would invalidate mentor tickets of people organizing competing events, they clearly do not take it seriously
- (franzi) Having sponsor mentors was a nice experiment but I don't think it worked out, caused a lot of confusion both among the mentor team and the sponsors, should not do it again
- (+1 caspar)
- external feedback:
- > An idea - Something that may be useful is a **mentor's area**, or something like this. It felt we were all over the place as we were utilised with helping the teams, but it would be nice if we all regroup in the same area when free, so we can exchange knowledge, feedback and ideas. Also a centralised place for the teams to find a mentor.
- > Also, a **list with useful contacts** for the mentors would be nice too. To whom we can reach out in different use-case scenarios while helping the teams. Like technical issues, question on submissions, etc.
- Idea: No separate mentor applications but everyone becomes a mentor by default and can pick up tickets.

### Judging (Nich, Jacob, Ksenia)
*Good:*
- (nich) All judges were ontime and besides the delay getting imports from Devfolio in the beginning, we were punctual in getting results in time for the closing ceremony.
- (nich) volunteers were amazing in getting teams to their judging groups for the pitches and communicating on their status with Jacob and I

*To be improved:*
- Next year no "circular" projects? No paying back to hackers (Kaan)
- do you think we should add this to the rules?
- More time for voting, maybe some curation? It's difficult to read through and decide what to vote on in 3 hours between the keynotes. (Kaan)
- some judges mentioned the description of the tracks were different to the public than to them - lets make sure we align on this for next time. (+1 Franzi)
- (nich) Some teams weren't able to make their pitch slots as they weren't at the venue when the pitching schedule was released. We can't do much about the short notice (between deadline and pitches), but maybe let's include explicit instructions in the handout cards as some people didn't read the website properly or didn't listen to the judging logistics during opening ceremony
- Honestly, website, printouts, what else can we do? I don't even understand why you would leave the venue after submission? We had food, drinks, couches, wifi
- (nich) lots of friction with ethercard onboarding onto the QV platform. factoryDAO said they might consider integrating POAPs instead of SBTs for next time, but either way this onboarding issue might be why we only had ~25% voter participation
- plus: we forgot to mention goerli testnet unfortunately, many tried mainnet and got nondescript errors
- We had some problems with copying large amount of data around in Cryptpad as well as being more people working in the same doc at once and ended up switching to google for the judging process. Not optimal to go against our values here, but we were too afraid that the judging process would fail with Cryptpad.
- For next time it would be nice to spend more resources on a system to avoid that asome judges are more generous with scores than other. The 5 highest voted projects were all infrastructure.
- is that an issue though? we do not compare between tracks, do we?

### Entertainment (Helena, Alex)
*Good:*
- (alex) Loved Watergate and really happy with the music upstairs + downstairs, wristband ticket system worked well (+1 Nich)
- (alex) Cinema: Saturday Doc & Movie night was awesome (+1 Nich)
- The afterparty was amazing! Great venue and awesome music, people danced all night while there was also a cozy space to hang out.

*To be improved:*
- (alex) Not sure DJs at the venue (hackathon) are necessary. Playlists seemed to have worked just as well. Could save on costs for the equipment.
- People liked the DJs! DJs in the creators lab were not needed imo, since nobody found the room. DJs in the tent a big yes from my side. (+1 Helena) Maybe we can also have them during the day instead of nights
- (alex) Cinema: definitely more potential to use with proper visuals + maybe a nice live set / some type of creative audio-visual show (was planned too late, but would LOVE to look into this more next year)
- (alex) Party: start at 9, but end at 4 am latest. Different set up re open bar as ppl left real quick once WG started charging (around 2 am) so I closed upstairs floor at 3 and had to squeeze victor + michael in for the closing set downstairs), no banners/deco necessary IMO. And FYI: 700 ppl counted.
- (alex) Görli + Waysa surprise: not sure the fridges were necessary - so much effort for little effect IMHO. Could have distributed in Factory fridges instead easily.

### Ticketing (Ligi, Afri)
*Good:*
- Having a ticketing system in place was much better than the Google sheet in 2019!

*To be improved:*
- We need to better / more clearly communicate about vouchers and their expiry.
- Expiry was one issue, but I was puzzled by how many people not understood that a voucher is not a ticket
- We should only use expiring vouchers for hackers, not for the other roles.
- Idea: Require a deposit that will be returned to motivate people not attending to return their tickets.

## Miscellaneuous
- General information on what's going on could be improved / made more visible. I would propose a separate screen with instructions for each ongoing phase in the main courtyard. (Carl)
- +1 Franzi for a screen with live-program overview (could even just display the website)
- Who's down for next year? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: