Les Amis d’Ethereum France #16 — Imaginer le futur des conférences Ethereum

Well, good evening everyone, welcome to this 16th edition of the Friends of Ethereum France Meetup. We've been organizing this Meetup monthly with Ethereum France for about a year and a half, so roughly one Meetup per month. This edition is about Ethereum conferences, and so first of all, thank you to Disac for initiating this event and to Jérôme and Comè for hosting us in their office tonight. So here's the program: we're going to talk about Ethereum conferences, I'll give an introduction about Ethereum France, and I'll also talk about Dev Connect because I'm the vice-president of the Ethereum France association and I also recently joined the Foundation to work specifically on Dev Connect. So, here's what happened last week, 10 days ago.

We'll have a short message from Jérôme about Dev Connect, and then the second part of the Meetup will focus specifically on Dev Connect with a participatory workshop that Disac will lead. And then, most importantly, beers and pizzas! Finally, a quick note: THIS Meetup is recorded and broadcast live. So, a quick word about Ethereum France: our mission is to popularize the Ethereum blockchain throughout the French-speaking world. We are a non-profit association (under the 1901 French law) and have existed since 2015.

For the past few years, we have had three main activities: firstly, community events like this one and our annual conference and CCI; secondly, publishing studies and content on our blog, and occasionally translating technical articles; thirdly, managing the community, bringing together the Ethereum community in France. We manage these different channels, which you can see here: our various Twitter accounts, the Meetup group, the Discord server, and our YouTube channel, where this Meetup will be broadcast. Among other things, you'll find recordings of past Meetups. You can become a member of this association if you aren't already. Membership allows you to contribute to the association in many ways, starting with paying your membership fee.

For the modest sum of €10, you'll gain access to our, shall we say, privileged channels on our Discord server, including a special channel. It also allows you to contribute to the association by writing articles, organizing Meetups, and helping us in general. So, it allows you to contribute in multiple ways, and you'll receive an NFT (Network Transfer Tool) or an SBT (Single Bet) as proof of your membership. You can do this on our website, ethereum-france.com, if you haven't already.

A quick word before we talk about Dev Connect: I've just published a list of Ethereum events in 2024. Since we're talking about imagining the future of Ethereum conferences, I'm going to talk about the near future here, with a number of conferences already planned—about fifty—and these are the most important ones. I've included the link for the list. And a special mention for this event, NFT Paris, which is taking place in Paris. A special link with this conference, but it has the merit of taking place in Paris, so I invite you to watch it.

It was quite big last year and it's likely to be quite important this year too. So, on February 23rd, we're organizing CC Week in Brussels this year—next year, sorry. So, HC6 is from the 8th to the 11th, and LACC Week generally starts before and lasts after, so about a week around. We have the DevCon date becoming clearer; it was announced for Q4 2024, and now we're talking about November 2024. We do n't yet have the exact location, but it will take place in November in Southeast Asia, so it's still a bit vague.

And the Aid Global events, the Aid Global events, which are, I think, the biggest events, have already been announced in London, Singapore, San Francisco, and also in Asia. So there was the one in Istanbul. Ten days ago, there was one of the biggest events of its kind, and it's really a great event. So, you can take a look at these events to plan your next year. So, I'm going to jump right in and give you a brief overview of DevConnect.

Were there any people in the room who were at DevConnect? Yes, one person. Well, very good. That way you'll have a good idea of ​​what it was. Who doesn't know DevConnect?

Maybe. Okay, well, I'll explain. DevConnect is an event initiated by the Ethereum Foundation. It's even more than just an event; it's a series of events, a week of independent events, even though it's organized by third parties. The Foundation only organizes part of it, and it took place this year in November, about ten days ago in Istanbul.

Perhaps you know DevCon, which I mentioned earlier. DevCon is different from DefCon. Sometimes people confuse the two; they are really two different series of events initiated and organized by the DevCon Foundation. It's been around since 2014, with the map of events here, which have taken place in Berlin, London, Shanghai, Kancun, Prague, Osaka, and Osaka ( which was in 2019). There have been some canceled years, then in Colombia in 2022, last year, and next year, in Southeast Asia.

DevCon is a big conference, similar to what we do with [unclear - possibly "etc."] It's a big conference, organized by the Foundation, which selects all the content and organizes everything. DefConnect is a bit different; it's a week of events, more like what we do with ITC Week. It's full of conferences and events from many different organizers at different times. Places in the city, uh, so it's more decentralized, let's say.

So what is Def Connect? It's independent events; each event will seek to delve deeper into specific themes in specific areas. Uh, it's going to bring together the community and the experts in the broadest sense. Uh, and a special mention for the coworking space, which the Ethereum Foundation organizes, and that's really the main thing the Foundation organizes. It's a place where people can gather during the week.

So it's mainly around that... well, let's say the coworking space is the nerve center of Dev Connect, but then a lot of things happen around it. And so, the role of the Foundation in this is to highlight the presence of this event, particularly with this coworking space, to bring people together, to unite people in this area of ​​the city, and also to allow local communities to develop. So the presence of Dev Connect in Istanbul has had a certain impact. Thinking about the local communities, we helped them, we involved them in the organization, and uh, I think there will be some great things coming out of it.

So, this was the 2nd edition of Def Connect. The first one was last year in Amsterdam, which was initially organized because, well, the idea came about because it was potentially simpler to organize, where it presented less risk in a context where COVID was quite prevalent. And also to present an alternative, another conference model, let's say, with different curation. The idea is really to give the curation to the event organizers and not to handle the curation of all the content for the entire conference. Since the foundation considered at that time—and I think it's quite right—that experts in certain fields are good enough, at least, to select their own content, it was an interesting approach.

I should also mention that Istanbul was suggested in the list in a forum and was eventually selected to host Dev Connect, so I don't know if that was the reason we chose it, but in any case, it was quite interesting that we had suggestions for venues to hold the conference and that in the end it was chosen. I think the community came and proposed and put together a kind of dossier on the forum, and then the Foundation evaluated the dossiers and selected Istanbul. So even in the venue selection process, it was done in a fairly collaborative way, which I find quite interesting. So, I'll go back a bit to what Dev Connect is. So, here I present the Dev Connect calendar, where the Foundation listed about fifty events that took place during the week.

So, we see the... Cork, but not only that, there were all kinds of events, 200 in total during the week. But the Foundation took the liberty, let's say, of doing a sort of pseudo- curation, or at least selecting events that it considered to be of high quality, in order to, let's say, direct attention to certain events. So, I'm going to talk to you about some of them, by theme. I also mention that all, or at least a good portion of these events, were recorded.

So, if you want to access the recordings of these events, you can access this link. The recordings were made via Streamed, which is an interesting application because all the video storage is decentralized, using a protocol called LivePer. So, it's good Doc Fooding, let's say. And on this application, you'll find the recordings of these different, or at least some of these different, events. I can mention a few, such as Headgunu, which was an event that the Foundation greatly supported.

It was with the Turkish community, where there were... With 2000 participants, it was truly one of the week's biggest events. Vitaliie came to speak, and there was AAM Yagucci from the foundation, as well as local speakers. We organized it really with the local community, and it was a way to involve the community, but also to showcase it and to tailor the content to a more beginner audience, let's say. And so it worked well.

Depending on your interests, you can see these different events and even go to the Def Connect calendar. A lot happened. So, for ER One, there was Solidity Summit, which is super interesting. There was also Zallou Exact; I do n't know if you've heard of it, but it's a fairly open event. I put it in the cryptography section, but it talks about longevity and lots of other things, and it's a bit of a unique format.

They had their first edition in Montenegro. And their format is a kind of Hacker House for a week or ten days where people come together, exchange ideas, and then give talks in relatively small groups, but it's of very high quality. So if you can go to Zallou sometime, it's super interesting. I think they're going to do some interesting things in the future too. In the gaming world, there was Autonomous World Assembly by Zer x Park, and another interesting format I'll mention here is the Un Conference.

These are conferences where there's no agenda; it's a kind of open mic where speakers come and speak if they want. It's a more collaborative format with whiteboards, and everyone can participate to some extent. So I was expecting a kind of general mess, but actually, it goes really well, and people are well-intentioned. The content that comes out of it is a bit different, and that makes the format super interesting. And global Istanbul, which I mentioned, uh, I'm going to talk to you briefly about the Def Connect conference, uh, since it was, as I was saying, one of the nerve centers of the week where everyone gathered and worked.

During the week, we had over 5,500 participants, and we created this conference from scratch, so it was a lot of work, uh, but we got good feedback, so it was pretty great. You can see here some different images. We created spaces; it was the automated space, let's say, rather relaxed, with generally distributed workspaces, especially the coworking space. I mentioned it because there was an interesting narrative that said, in any case, we talked about it, but we heard it several times, that coworking spaces are the new conferences, so as we try to imagine new types of... Conferences, in any case, the future, or what conferences could be, well, in any case, I find this approach interesting.

But what emerges is that ultimately we also hold conferences to bring the community together, and that coworking spaces fulfill this role well. And I think it was quite successful. And one last interesting element is that we created discussion corners in the coworking space, a bit like an Open Mic format, where people could come and reserve a space by putting their name down and speak for two hours to anyone who wanted to talk about an open topic. I don't think I've seen that at other conferences, and it worked rather well. And again, these are things we're testing, and we'll see what we do with them later, but it was certainly a success.

And we also made meeting rooms available so that everyone could reserve them. So, conferences then, and it went very well, so that was quite interesting. That's all for me for the Dev Connect tour. I'm going to hand it over to Jérôme, who will say a few words about HCC. Who in this room doesn't know HCC?

We've done our job well, being one of the most frequently organized events in the entire ecosystem. We started here with Dev Connect Paris in 2017, so practically that many times already, and now this is the 8th time we've organized a major event in the Ethereum ecosystem. It's quite special here because it's pretty much the only event of its kind. We're organized by an association, which is almost nonexistent with the Foundation. It's based on mutual respect and the fact that we organize this event every year.

So last year, well, this year, it was HCC 6, which took place in July. Most of you have heard of it, or at least I was there or heard about this conference a long time ago, July, but a few reminders: in terms of numbers, we had 5,200 people who came to the conference, 350 speakers, that's a lot, a lot, a lot of speakers. In terms of size, well, it's even bigger than Defcon, so it's quite a huge conference. And since it takes place every year in Paris, well, people know it's happening, and I plan to be there. So it's now on the calendar, booked and seen, and companies are organizing to come and be present to make announcements, develop their business, recruit, as well as people who want to participate and discover this industry.

We had 12 tracks, 12 themes that were covered throughout, and more than 120 hours of content that you can find on the channel and in France, of course. So it's a conference that's possible because there are volunteers who participate; we had about 200 this year, and we're opening There are also places for students so that students can come to the conference for free and participate from all over the world. We've changed the format a bit this year. CC6 was, for the first time, an event organized across several buildings. It's the first time we've done that.

Yes, I have an organizer looking at me, wondering what he's going to say. So, it's the first time we've had several buildings, and it was a challenge for us. Well, most of the conference takes place in the Maison de la Mutualité, but you have to walk five minutes to get to a second building, the Collège des Bernardins, to see what's happening there. The rest of the events were taking place there. And that allowed us to start occupying the street a bit.

We're going to start putting some of the catering outside. We're going to perhaps start partnering with restaurants and cafes on the side of the street. All of this is happening because the conference has grown a lot, so holding this conference in Paris is good, it's good to do it regularly in the same place because it allows us to be more efficient, our organization, to work with the same partners more or less. But it also creates difficulties for growth because there aren't many venues in central Paris that can accommodate 5,000 people; there are practically none at all. So if we want to hold a bigger conference, we're forced to have smaller venues around a medium-sized one, or to have a really gigantic venue, like a palace, a sports arena, an exhibition hall, something completely huge.

So today we're in a "suit spot," so to speak, 5,000, 6,000, 7,000. Okay, that's still manageable, but if we wanted 15,000, there wouldn't really be any venues that could accommodate it, so we'd have to go straight to 40,000 or 50,000. And to do something completely, well, completely disproportionate—we're not indulging in delusions of grandeur, we believe in the ecosystem, we believe in the demand there is to attend this conference, and we're also starting to believe we're really growing with the events being organized around it. So, this illustration here, you see, if you click on CC Week, you can see the 300 side events that are being organized at the same time. This allows us to grow in a decentralized way, and it's good to grow in a decentralized way when you're doing a blockchain conference.

Well, this year is special because next year is special because we're going to do it in Brussels, due to the presence of the Olympic Games. We're very happy with this decision because now we learn that they're going to double the price of the metro and that you can't drive in Paris. We think, well, we made the right choice. We would have had a nice surprise, thinking that we were finally doing it in Paris again. But that doesn't mean we won't come back to Paris one day.

And we're also taking the opportunity to be here in Brussels to think about new things we could do, imagine being here differently. And that's the whole point of this Meetup: to tell you that this year, well, we're doing it in Brussels. I hope you'll make the trip to join us in this new city, but also to reflect on what has worked well at other conferences, since we have a venue that lends itself much more to experimentation and... The aim is to introduce new things into this conference, so it will take place over four days. There will be roughly the same themes, some new themes, and themes that will change a bit.

We're expecting a larger audience and more speakers, and the enthusiasm is very strong, based on what we've seen at other TRM conferences we've attended. We're saying, "Wow, that's great! A new city, Brussels! Fantastic!" So, frankly, for now, things are looking very, very good for the organization of this event, both for the association and the organizers.

We're going to take this Meetup opportunity to also get your feedback: what you didn't like at CC6, what you liked elsewhere, what you would have liked to see done again at CC7 and CC6, and all your ideas. And now I'll hand it over to Disiaac to lead this workshop. Thanks, Jérôme, for this presentation and feedback on ICC. So, we're going to offer you a small participatory workshop. It's something...

Once again for Ethereum France, we thought it was extremely important to gather everyone's feedback, and we're going to do it the old-fashioned way with the BOCs you see on this table. We're investing in equipment; we bought a lot of sticky notes thanks to your memberships in the association. The association costs €10, which gives you voting rights, and it also allows us to buy colored sticky notes. So, we're going to have three BOCs, three places where you can express yourself anonymously. We have a zero-ledger system on top to guarantee your anonymity.

So, the green BOC, that's the BOC, so it's for telling us about your favorite moments, what you loved about Ethereum in France. I'm not supposed to move around with the camera, am I? Okay, so you'll have green sticky notes where you can tell us about your favorites. You really should go because it always makes the team happy, and it's Extremely important, the second jar is a red sticker with a minus sign. This is to express the points for improvement that you noted on ethcc.

If you say, "Ah well, that was something...", well, if we can avoid that, that would be good. The last jar is the yellow one. This is to express the future of ethcc7 B, all your ideas, all your desires. And finally, the goal will be, based on this collaborative work in the coming days and weeks, to create a short blog post and draw lessons from all of this.

Is that clear? Do you have any questions about this little workshop that we're testing, that we're improvising? No, that's clear to everyone. Okay, so we're going to move on to distributing the POSs now. Yes, who didn't participate last year?

Okay, that's interesting. So, focus on the yellow sticky notes for us. Express what you'd like to see in ICC 7, uh, your ideas, and honestly, feel free, we can, we can go ahead, it's not the decision-making process either, we're going to gather feedback, and there you go, there are budget and time considerations, and we're going to discuss all of that together. I'm going to hand over the microphone because I'm also going to fill in the little sticky notes, and there you go, we'll give ourselves 10, 15 minutes to think about it, I don't know, we'll see, and then we'll gather all of that, thank you, uh, we'll start with a little, a little green note maybe, so what does it start with? Nothing to add, that's positive, uh, level, speaker, and topic are top-notch, well, that's always, it's always a pleasure, thank you, thank you, audience, I'm going to, I'm going to draw another one, and like that, I'm going to tell you, no, but wait, if you want, we can, we can, if we, if we keep all the glasses for the, it would be better to keep the glasses for the end because, in fact, it would be better to read the glasses after reading the red ones because So, like that, we remember...

I didn't think I'd do all the verses at once, I just thought I'd start on a positive note because it's always nice. Thanks to the whole team and the volunteers. So, another thank you message. Okay, you want to get down to brass tacks? Well, you want to read a little red one?

Okay, I'm reading a red one. The lack of space for latecomers, it's true that it's a real problem. No, that's a real problem, the fact that we're sold out every year because, because, because that indicates that there's more demand than supply and that we have room to grow, but also that we could regulate it with the price. We could say, well, in fact, we just have to make the tickets more expensive so that at some point there will be a selection. It's something we forbid ourselves from doing because of our status as an association, but it's something that creates problems.

Well, you have to buy your tickets early. We also try to... We don't want to encourage a secondary market to avoid speculation around tickets, and that's not a perfect choice either, because you could say we let people buy tickets and then sell them. So we're trying our best to juggle these different issues, and we have many internal debates with the attendees and at the association level. If you want to discuss with us how to better regulate tickets and all that, we're very open to your ideas.

Today, we're mainly trying to continue growing without jeopardizing the association's finances and also without heavily discriminating through pricing for conference access. So, I can only give you this advice: if you want to be sure of getting a ticket to be here, buy it when tickets go on sale because the first wave of tickets often lasts 5 or 6 days, while the others last only a few hours or minutes. But there you have it, and it's true, it's a real problem. Come on, more red, isn't that already the case? No, I'll take one like that, saying the red is coming, so be careful...

Transparency on the criteria for being a Media Partner, it's true, uh, there's no transparency on the criteria for being a Media Partner, that's a very good, uh, very good criticism, and uh, there again, it's often done on a first-come, first- served basis. We should be more transparent about the first partners for Media Partners, woo woo, frankly, it pleases me, I don't know what he's writing, the mass acatons, no, the mass acatons, thank you, so wait, we'll try to decipher this one, the no, the acatons, the mass acatons, there's someone, there's someone who is very happy about the, about the, about the acatons, well, great, uh, how many mass acatons were there? There were like three or four, I think, yeah, there were different ones, okay, uh, a little drink, good idea about the double venue, uh, it was frankly risky for us to do this double venue because we, we were coming off a particularly scalded experience in terms of organization, ease of venue and all this at events like NFT New York City where there were like six venues around the same thing and it was frankly difficult to go there the conference sponsors were really hard actually this year they did everything in the same place but the previous editions of NFC New York City were spread out and we thought damn we're going to have to do that too it's complicated for us we managed to get two venues that were close together which is also complicated on that side ENF and great bads indeed it's good now if you have your ens you note that we have the NS as. And I talk about it regularly, we'd really like to be able to distribute your name one day. And that way you'd have your membership as a member of LAASS, or rather, of the organization in France.

We're still working on it, we'll eventually find a solution to distribute them to you, and in that case you'll have yours. We might start with a yellow one. You have n't commented on it yet, I think. So, we're finishing up the yellow ones, we're finishing up the red ones. After that, we did our self- assessment on the red and green ones.

I'm going to focus on the red ones so everyone can read it too, or be as clear as possible about access to the closing night, depending on the tickets, especially per day. Yeah, so the daily tickets were a consolation solution to be able to organize ourselves properly, given that some tickets were completely sold out. So, in fact, it's possible for us to have more daily tickets because we can regulate the flow a bit more, but finding venues that can accommodate 6,000 people for an evening with the problems of... Everything is also excessively complicated and excessively expensive, so, as noted, we should be clearer about these access conditions, and we will certainly do so for next year. Too much division in too short a period, why not extend the duration to have more side events?

Yeah, uh, absolutely. And here, in fact, it's a question of volume. No, go ahead, go ahead. That's because Lake Week is as long as you want, in fact, meaning that events can start two months in advance. The problem is that you won't have, you won't benefit from, the people present to be here.

So, that doesn't depend on us. Uh, but I see, I see, I'm responding to that comment, which is interesting. Uh, we deliberately, for etc., yes, which is the week around EC, we deliberately didn't do a lot of curation because we want it to remain open to everyone, so that everyone can organize and everyone can go to these events, especially in the context where places here are limited. That's a very interesting point.

I think that for me, development connects a bit too much, for example, with curation, perhaps not enough. So maybe there's a happy medium to be found. These are interesting avenues to explore, conferences that emphasize use cases. I imagine that's a criticism because conferences don't emphasize use cases enough, and indeed, CC isn't really a conference that emphasizes use cases but rather focuses on problems and ways to solve them according to themes. It's a positioning that allows us to partially avoid the presentations on stage being too much of a product demonstration rather than what it's trying to solve.

On the other hand, for use cases, well, I think conferences are the right place for that because at least that way you see that this problem is solved in this way, and there you have it, a use case of blockchain application to this or this product to that. So I take that point. Regarding the fact that use cases aren't represented enough, there's an enterprise track at Etc. where traditional companies have recently started using blockchain more, and there's the DeFFI track where you really have a good use case. And now there's also the gaming track, since there are more and more games and initiatives that are close to research on that topic.

But highlighting use cases more often exposes us to more advertising within the talks here, and so there's... there's... there's... that creates a lot of curation effort, a lot of curation effort that we sometimes choose ourselves, saying, "Well, like in the CCs, we don't curate, or we curate a little bit," or in the case of the TOCs, well, actually we curate heavily. Wow, we've already sifted through the worms, okay?

I'm looking at the worms on the internet, okay? On the internet, yes, yes, no, because... I think Betina... Arranged by category, and in fact, there are piles that form, and the biggest pile of glasses is for the quality of the speakers, so that's the biggest pile of glasses we can see. There's also a good pile of glasses at the top...

well, I don't know what it is... the spaces, the SW, the organization, the food, the food... so, oh, thank you. At the top, it's mainly the organizational stuff. Otherwise, there's everything related to...

thank you Jérôme, to the speaker, to the quality of the conferences, and so on. Big up for the videos, LACC week, the students, our sponsors' booths, and then the lost ones, there you go, and NES, big up. Yes, I think we can... well, this is a little moment of congratulations for the videos because, in fact, the little anecdote about the videos is that we started doing conferences the size of... with the Far Crack project, with Con following almost immediately, DevCon 2 and DevCon 2 September 2016.

We had... we had... Vaguely, a live stream wasn't going through the Chinese firewall very well at that time, and then we got the videos about 8 months later, something like that. So, 8 months into the 2016-2027 period, it was already practically outdated, and a lot of people in the ecosystem were complaining, " Oh, but it's impossible, where are the Decon 2 videos? Where are the videos of this and that?"

So when we organized it, we said, "No, wait, we're going to do something crazy, we're going to do a free live stream, and also the editing—in any case, the stream is already available right away, and almost the editing right away." And that was possible because we have a great video team that takes care of it, and then it created, it created almost a standard. People now, it's become the standard in the industry. When there's a conference, we get the video almost immediately, and that's great precisely to compensate for the fact that... It's not necessarily accessible to everyone to be here because you're not in Paris, because the tickets are expensive, because the tickets are single-player.

At least you have access to the content right away, you know? And I wanted to talk about the videos, yes, plus it's always a technical challenge since we're growing in size, and this year I acted as the liaison between the developers and the YouTube channel. So we're now planning two additional YouTube channels in case something goes wrong. And so we have a total of two YouTube channels. ETC was in France, and one of them went down the day before the event, so we had to use a first backup.

So, as I was saying, the day before, the first backup was used, there was still the backup of the backup, and then things got complicated, but it worked out, and it's always a very exciting moment when we press On the button, there are the SEP streams starting simultaneously, it's... oh yeah, no, but really, I was... it really moved me. We're going back a bit to... so, on the...

on the reds... so there's a food point, and the food point is in the greens, and in the reds there are a lot of people who are full of food... no, there's one person... there's one person... it's true that...

well, tastes and preferences vary. It's difficult to make menus that suit everyone, so we try to make menus that accommodate most dietary restrictions, whether personal or medical. Uh, yeah, it's true that the kebab was great... uh, well... and...

and yes, we... well, the food... an important point about food is that you have to size up the food, have enough food for everyone, knowing that not everyone eats at the event, so it's a... It's a real headache, you would n't realize how much people are trying to avoid wasting food. We're focusing on improving the food, and it's good when you're in the same city to be able to work with the same producers and put them in competition, test things out, and all that.

With Brussels, we'll have to innovate, but I'm not making any assumptions about the quality of food in Brussels. I'm sure we'll manage to find something great. I also see a point about price reductions, rising prices. I want to address the issue of rising prices because, as you know, there's inflation right now, and it's affecting the events industry too, or rather, it's particularly affecting events. Events have really become much, much more expensive.

I don't have the exact figures in mind, but I think we're talking about something like 20%, 40%, 30%, yeah. It's between 10 and 40% on most of our expenses from our suppliers, which is a lot of inflation that we're forced to pass on because we're trying to at least cover our costs, and if possible, a little more for next year so we can grow. So when you do a conference, you have three options for generating revenue. You can ask the speakers to pay, for example, you organize a great panel with people who have millions of followers, and you leave an empty chair. You go and see some projects, saying, "Would you like to do a panel with all these people?"

Well, that's €30,000. So you can try to get the speakers to pay, saying, " You're in a room and you're speaking right after Vitalic Butterine." The problem with trying to get the speakers to pay is that you lower the quality of the speakers, since people have paid to be there, but you also lower the fundamental, the average quality of your speakers because people who know they're being used to promote other projects will tell you... What am I going to do on a panel with so-and-so, and we don't even know who he is, where he came from, or what his project is. It hasn't even launched yet; they're doing something that seems a bit of a scam.

Anyway, the more you try to make money from your speakers, the harder it is to get quality speakers. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's definitely complicated, both organizationally and operationally. So, there aren't any paid speakers who pay for TOCCs, except for Diamond sponsors who guarantee a slot. But generally, the people we accept in Diamond have interesting things to say anyway, so they're there. And we're public about how we operate.

That said, when we've decided we can't charge the speakers, we can charge the sponsors a little, and we can charge the attendees a little. So, we look at how many sponsors we have. Finally, regarding the budget, we try to distribute it between the sponsors and attendees and pass on the inflation between the two. Sorry, I'll just add to what Jérôme said that we went from 3 days of conference to 4 days, from €300 to €400. So, in fact, the conference hasn't become more expensive; there's just one extra day that costs the same as the other days that were there before.

That's the Inc. point, like, yes, indeed, the products are more expensive, but they've also improved. You have a 30% larger screen on your television, so yes, it's more expensive, but not personally. But it's difficult, actually. We're forced to pass on the costs one way or another.

There's also a small pile of negatives in the middle, always a lack of guidance, finding who, what, where, disjointed information, so it's difficult to find your way around. That's true. So, I have my own little idea about that. We can do a lot of things to make the conference more accessible: floor markings, guides, all that. But there's a certain amount of information that the average person can absorb in a new venue.

For example, the venue's floor plan, the layout of the place, etc. Okay, a lot of information. And the bigger the venue and the more content you add, the more you reach the limit of what's absorbable. Under these conditions, we never exhaust all the information and ways we can find out. So it's a very good point.

We're trying to develop applications and solutions, and we'll continue to innovate in CC8 with this. But I think it's going to remain a fairly recurring problem if we keep expanding. On the other hand, if we restrict the size—if you have a room with H speakers, you know how it works here—you have a room with a speaker, well... But as soon as we start to expand and are constrained by the venue's geography and the number of venues... It's more complicated, that is to say, next year, uh, we'll have almost everything in the same place, or rather, everything in the same place, so, uh, normally at least you'll have a vertical structure in the organization, in the planning.

Are we moving a bit towards yellow, uh, from S, we're going around all the... there are still some reds left, but, uh, big reds, you know, the ticket prices, yeah, okay, more meat, uh, how does it work in Belgium with game? There are some nice things, it's not the season, that's true, it's the season, the noise, the noise, yeah, there's a technical question about the HCC ticket discounts with the poap, uh, the NFT and CC3 weren't taken into account, oh, I think so, yeah, I think that's... yeah, I'm totally blown away and I'm super, super cool, uh, because the creation of the Rafale was outsourced to Comè, my company, so it's a It's a small project, I assure you, but we were busy redoing the Defcon 6 raffle, which we improved, we changed things, and then we contributed to the open- source thing, but we thought... well, we made a mistake, sorry if that's the case, sorry.

And then, on top of that, I'm thinking, "Oh no, I have a tod list where it says, 'Ah, Diac, you should make a list of all the Sol Bon token NFTs that the association has issued,' and well, I haven't done it. So, that's something I also have to do, try to collect all the Sol Bon tokens we've issued over the last 6 or 7 years, or NFTs, to make a list. And we just have to make sure we don't forget any. So yeah, that's something we still have to do, the part about the noise... uh, we have...

it's... so it's a... It's a problem that's often linked to the venue and the concentration within it. It's an important point because the more noise there is, the more fatigue there is. There's also fatigue from noise.

When you spend four days in a noisy place, you're more tired than if you spend four days in a quiet place. Those who have children here realize this. I mean, I think we're doing pretty well compared to other conferences. I don't want to point fingers, but there are conferences where you have stages in the middle of... going into the middle of...

in the middle of... and it's hell because you have a warm-up act on one side talking... well, we really take this noise aspect into account, and I think that next year, with the size of the venue, we'll be even better at absorbing it. But even then, the work is never truly finished, going from one site to another, or it's no better. Everyone should do both events and the conference events, okay cool, so, well, actually, if you want to host conferences, maybe to do a little advertising for the association, you can come to the Therum France Discord and tell us what Bit Connect is, is it a good conference or is it a bit of a no-go, and is FTX Con cool or not, what do you think and all that, you can just consult the Cur community with the Therum France Discord if you want advice on what has been listed, uh, I don't know, in any case we will take your remarks into account to improve, anyway, let's move on to yellow, we're moving on to yellow, there's a big pile here, a big t, it's the big pile of yellow, I think, basically all that, can you maybe comment, Benoît, that's it, yes Beno, top left, or I'm trying to make groups, but on the left it would be more like the general activities Here we're focusing more on organization, so let's take the first pile.

I'm reading coworking spaces, lots of coworking pressure, or, uh, coworking—basically, alternative spaces, basically just conferences, speed dating too, so people can meet easily. Yeah, there's a demand, I get the impression there's a demand for alternative spaces outside of conferences strictly speaking. Is this something we're considering? Where are we at with this? Can you tell us something, honestly?

uh, there's been so much development of dating apps. You can swipe right, swipe left, you should be able to find one that says, "I'll make you a special one for the event." You can just fill it out and you're good to go. It's really cool, and actually, it's something I personally really appreciated at Def Connect: the fact that there's a lot of coworking space. You can say, "Okay, let's meet up."

Well, this is cool, uh, I had a few business meetings with people who said, "I booked a room, look," and CER was also very convenient, and that's a very good point. Okay, Beno, can you comment on another one of our piles, for example, the one at the bottom right? What does this big one here correspond to? This group, yeah, it's more for conference proposals or specific topics, so that's interesting. Wait, who's writing in big letters, " Comet Connect integration"?

There's an Insider in the room, I have the paper, but I don't know, we're going to do some tests. First, it's not me, and especially, Comet Connect, in fact, has started to create a kind of passport, well, partnerships to create a kind of passport, something called Zallou, which is another conference in the ecosystem. Uh, there are lots of solutions available there. I should point out that Comet Connect is built on SAFE, so there you go, we can, in any case, we can try to snowball as much as possible and... The problem with feeding on what is produced in the ecosystem is that, due to CC's position, when a solution is chosen, it is given undue prominence, and this is something we have tried to address.

The aim is to be as neutral as possible. For example, until now I don't think you've noticed at all that the raffle initially featured Troubit, and then Comè, because we don't want it to be used as a billboard for, "Oh look, these are the companies that do good stuff," or "They do good stuff." Anyway, when we choose something to integrate into our tech stack, we want to make sure that it works for the 350 speakers and the 6,000 people who come. Then, for specific needs, we can use things from here and there, but it's definitely something we try to be as neutral and agnostic as possible, and not promote solutions that aren't respectful of privacy, that aren't respectful of this or that. We don't want to influence the ecosystem too much by saying, "This thing is cool, go for it!"

What, but listen, if we ever need a Connect conference, I won't be able to stand in my way. I'm starting to laugh at what I'm reading. So there are requests for Jean-Claude Vanam to do the opening, CC7 too, Patrick Collins, and there's also a request for an Irdrop interview, I think, with Vital Butterine. An interview with Jean-Claude Vanam by Vital Butterine, frankly, that's good. So what about more gaming conferences?

Well, more gaming conferences, the particularity is that there was little gaming content before. This track had a bit more space than what was ultimately available, if I remember correctly. But in a year, a lot has been done on gaming, and the Autonomous World track and other gaming events at Dev Connect indicate this. So we'll clearly have more things. What surprised me about the gaming conferences is that there were a few side events, like just drinks and stuff on the gaming side, because...

It's one of the industries I work in, and I was happy to go. There wasn't really a specific gaming event at the time, so it's good to see these tracks appear, and clearly we'll want more Layer 2. So, actually, it's Layer 2, sorry, I was reacting, but there were already a lot of them, these are bigger tracks, and besides, it's becoming complicated because, again, in this spirit of not doing a product showcase at the time, for example, Starknet does Starknet CC, so there are talks on Starknet CC, but there's also a lot of stuff on Starknet if you want to discover the Startnet ecosystem, discover more tracks on Startnet, promote certain projects on Startnet, well, Startnet does its conference alongside it, but then when you have five different shades of ZKVM, five different shades of alternative music and stuff that are faster than VM on that and better, like, you have a lot of Different optimistic rolls, and in addition to the TR layer, optimistic RUPs could start to have a lot of them, so it becomes difficult because you'll have some who say, " No, but wait, I don't understand, there are only two talk Z scrolls," and then there are three of this and so on. We don't want to position ourselves as arbiters of good solutions, good ways of doing rollups, so it will be a real challenge to come for participation, to try to satisfy all the technologies, all their supporters, all their stuff, and to showcase them together. But on that, it's often companies that are very well funded or protocols that are very well funded and that always do very big events, sometimes even the biggest side events, so it's also those that offer tokens.

In Paris, there's a point I do n't understand: live governance battles. So, I'm perhaps... So, in the new venue, there's a room that could be very well suited to organizing... Governance meeting, uh, it's a governance meeting, well, actually, you know, there are, I'm thinking of, for the governance of Thereum, there's a regular call called the All Core Dev Meeting where you have about forty people, even fifty people, who meet on this platform and discuss. Polygon holds its Polygon conferences, which we haven't mentioned, Polygon, so there you go.

Uh, if the YouTube Authority is watching, you haven't mentioned this thing, look, uh, so Polygon also holds the same types of conferences, all that, if protocols want to organize, or DAOs want to organize, debates and governance meetings with their attendees who will be there, uh, I think it's something we can do this year since we have a room that's well suited for it, a large boardroom with lots of microphones that we can turn on. Good point, oh yeah, I think it's different spaces, different things, different things, different ways of structuring the space and all that. Um, the conferences in English and French, well, there's always been a track in French, and if not, well, when we do it that time, we kind of forget about the other stuff, and it's difficult to find a good position on that, between saying we make content in French, we don't make content in French, and all the live translation, even on technical things, on YouTube works pretty well for following the content in French. Actually, our mission is to promote blockchain and Ethereum in the French-speaking world, which means that the content written by Ethereum France is in French. But now we're seeing that we're attracting people from all over the world when we do this here, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to make these tracks in French.

That's right, in the text, it's true. What's more, A-Z sales window? Ah, okay, more, more... well, there you go. Okay.

Does anyone want to speak because we might have missed a post, or we didn't have time to read everything or even react to what was just said? What's the deal about Patrick Collins being number 2 after Jean-Claude Van Damme? Okay, maybe an interview with Patrick Collins by Jean-Claude Van Damme? So, just a comment about the people we invite and all that, well, we build our reputation and our continuity in the community, in CC, which means that when we open the call for speakers, it fills up, and generally we don't have to chase people down. We do n't call back 15 times to ask, "Are you coming?"

and "What are you going to talk about?" And all the people who are visible in the ecosystem and generally give interesting talks come back, so that's cool. There are people we've been trying to get for a long time, like Andreas Antonopoulos, who promised us several times that he was going to come, but he He still hasn't come, and in fact, in terms of pure organization, chasing after people to get them to come is very time-consuming. If you have direct contact with Patrick Collins, tell him, "It just opened, come on, come on," and so on. It's not easy.

Then, if you have people in the ecosystem who aren't necessarily experts, it's complicated to get hold of them and all that. But I'm not a researcher who specializes in something that interests you and that you'd like us to contact, saying, "Yeah, frankly, he's not a typical suspect at conferences." We'd have to motivate him a bit, ask him what he'd be interested in. We can do the work. But if you want to see a particular minister, do something specific, or have people who are in high demand, chasing after them is actually a lot of work that we're not equipped to handle.

No, I'm going to jump in with an idea—it's not mine—that's quite interesting regarding everything related to governance. Jean VAM, no, governance, that That would be great, that would be a great advertisement, uh, governance and so on, I think it's interesting to explore that, what can be done live or not, or even put into production, I don't know, just putting something on GitHub, you see, so that we have the feeling that all the participants have participated in something a little bigger than themselves and that there has been an impact, I don't know if you understand what I mean, there is, I understand what you want to tell me, I have the MV Burn, you, I'll give you an example, the MV Burn that is live, launched on GitHub on such and such a day, well you see, it's, I'll give you an example like that, I have a little widget on my phone that tells me how much B each day, I'll answer you, maybe not in the, maybe not, well maybe indirectly and directly on that, ah you mean that we, that we say that we would all make a decision, okay, so, uh, in fact, there is often a question that comes up when we present Ethereum to a more traditional audience Or people who are somewhat knowledgeable or something, but how does Ethereum governance work? Because what's going on? So, to explain it on camera, Ethereum governance is open, so you can post an EIP (Evidence-Initiative Proposal). There's a template to follow.

You can post a proposal to change Ethereum, and so on. You have to justify it; there are things to do on it. And when the IP has been discussed sufficiently, and it has progressed in terms of its justification and its contribution to the protocol, this decision is debated technically. That is to say, you are invited to an event called the AllCor Dev Meeting where you have all the people who maintain Ethereum, the Ethereum clients, for example, OpenEtherium and all that. And you also have other people from the Ethereum protocol who speak on other points, who are also there, and they discuss...

Okay, your idea, it's not bad, I think it... Whoever says that a counter-argument is wrong is right, I think that's it, and in the end there must be a general consensus in the assembly to say okay, we're going to implement it, that is, we're all going to change in our LG client code so that it works like this, it works like this. These are very interesting debates, meaning that once the philosophical debate around the interest has been done and the philosophical debate around the technical interest has been done, there is implementation, and when something has been completely implemented, we decide on a date on which it is integrated into the final network. So the force is planned for that. These ALLC meetings are a bit remote; they take place online.

The dates are planned, everyone participates, everyone watches, everyone participates, and you can participate as a speaker if you have an IP address. It would be a very good opportunity to do one live. That is to say, to tell people, "Well, great, we're going to do an all-C meeting live where you have the people speaking who are on SC and the people watching who can be in the audience or on the internet," uh, involve everyone at the conference to do something within the protocol at the same time. We can think about an application; we would propose an IP address, the IP address here, and this API was discussed on the day of the meeting, and there you go. But we would need to find an idea that is interesting because, in fact, this meeting is like the discussion to see if we do a pre-committee on this curve and all that, it's rather technical.

So if you have ideas for things you would like to see implemented in the Ethereum ecosystem in general, and that could be the subject of a protocol modification and that could involve HC and us to push it, we are quite willing to look into this, but we would first need to have grounds to file a complaint, you know? B, good idea, but otherwise, in fact, the room we are going to have The debates are great for that, and if you have a DAO and want to take advantage of being here to organize an event with your members, it's completely possible. In any case, if there's a desire to create working groups, send a message on Discord, we'll put out a call for participation, and we'll get started right away. The association is here for that, to bring together the strengths of the community. So, there you go, don't hesitate, we're really open to all these ideas, and we'll provide the means for them to be fully realized, of course.

So, if you have any other questions, you see, we have a magnificent image of all the positions that are found on it. So the goal will be to archive this, and I'll have the difficult and delicate task of proposing a summary. So, in the coming weeks, I'll be working on a short summary that will be published on the association's blog with this document, of course, and we'll try to draw lessons from it. All this to set the stage for a super event, so a big thank you to Jérôme who ran this workshop with a firm hand. Bravo, bravo to you!

It was an exercise for the organizers, it was a difficult exercise. A big thank you also to the counters who agreed to do this work. Thank you, thank you to them, and thank you again to Comette for hosting us. And now, let's get to the food and drinks! [Applause] [Music] Thank you!