Motivation
Conference side events can be a significant value add. However, there does seem to be a desire for competing parties to host their own exclusive event(s) which overlap in content and timing. As such, a challenge arises; attention fragmentation.
One reason is that side event goers often feel compelled to check out multiple side events. In doing so, they spend a bunch of time traveling from one side event to another. If there are competing side events, like at the recent EthCC, the “travel track” lowers overall attendance. As a panelist or a speaker, it’s not very much fun talking at an empty room.
While skimming this paper “Group Activity Matching with Blockchain Backed Credible Commitment”, one naive thought occurred. There would probably be less conference side events if the attendee commitments to attend said side events were credible. For instance, Luma signup does not typically require users to make a credible commitment. There is no fee to sign-up, and no consequence for not attending. Sometimes organizers decide to charge a fee. For example, the upcoming Plasmacon charged $10 to apply.
$10 might not be enough to make the commitment credible. People might just buy the slot and still skip (even expense it!). Perhaps there is a sweet spot, $20, $50? Designing this mechanism correctly would require a lot of thought and trial/error in practice. Conference goers may reject this approach, for example, based on social norms.
Indeed, attendees in this model are buying an option to attend the event. They must buy the option to attend. If the organizer is unable to get potential attendees to buy options to attend, then they likely will not put on the event. Organizes would be incentivized to plan events well in advance of conferences because attendees would only want to buy the option to attend if they were sure there was added value add.
If one recalls correctly, “re-staking day” charged a fee of $50 to attend. This forced people to make a firm decision about attending. Some did not sign up to attend because they did not want to buy the option, knowing that the odds of attending were low.
Should this practice became the industry standard, likely speakers and topics would need to be organized sooner. This may reduce last-minute event preparations on the whole. You may say this fee prevents some folks from attending. One could argue this is already the case because, typically, to attend a side event you must explain yourself - professional qualifications. There is already a filtering process.
Even so, if enough options are sold, then some of those funds could be used to sponsor folks who do not have the resources to purchase an option. Other tuition sponsorship like schemes could also be used. Another advantage of this model is event organizers would not need to solicit sponsors to fund an event. Instead, organizers host an event only within the means of the ticket sales and perhaps some organizational expenditures. But asking 50k for sponsorship is now off the table, faux pas.
Application Sketch
Potentially, there could be an application called “Event Planner” or something like this, which helps folks in the community collaboratively plan side-events and receive credible commitments from attendees as well as speakers/panelists.
Agents
- Attendees - people attending side events
- Organizers - people who organize the side events
- Speakers - people who give presentations or speak on panels at side events
- AV team - team responsible for recording and live-streaming the event content over the internet as well as managing the in-person experience.
- Caterers - people interested in providing food for events
- Location hosts - people who own/responsible for the available locations for each potential event
Product Requirements
- App that allows attendees to sign up for the event (this would be similar to Luma or eventbrite but built on Anoma)
- Calendar which can be shared among all trusted agents (could use some sort of reputation system)
- Available locations for each potential date listing features and limitations (capacity, affordances, aesthetics)
- Available caterers for each potential date listing food options including dietary accommodations
- Oracle providing a feed of popular crypto events (EthCC, Devcon, EthGlobal London, SBC, etc.)
- Active view of various side-event markets (how many tickets have been sold so far, what % to sales goal)
- Slick user interface which works as an application on iOS/Android mobile devices complete with different tabs and dropdown menu filters displaying relevant criteria
- Allow flexibility for attendees (option buyers) in making commitments (maybe challenging but something like $0 non-committal but interested in coordinating, $10 soft commitment, $50 hard commitment)
- Provide a secondary market place in app for option buyers to re-sell their options. This could be done with an AMM style mechanism.
- Currency agnostic - users can make commitments in any tokens they want. At first this maybe difficult but should be the endgoal.
- Provide links for in app viewing of the event so participants not in town can view the event directly from the application without needing to leave and view on Youtube for example.
Mechanism
- Agents need to be able to express intents for side events they want to organize, attend, speak at, host, cater, or provide AV services to. Other agents could also express intents to write blogposts about the event or live tweet for example.
- Agents should be able to set-up a local controller (only operated b/w the relevant agents), match intents by running a simple solver algorithm locally which can then “settle” all of the intents by submitting a TX for ordering first by their local controller to agree on the order and content of the TX, then submit the results to a persistent controller to make any relevant state changes e.g., disbursement of funds (creating and consuming resources)
- Its also possible agents may want direct settlement from Ethereum or it’s L2 for example and may skip the step of setting up a local controller. This is entirely up to the agents. They could still benefit from batching intents in an atomic TX instead of submitting a TX for each preference.
- This structure allows for atomic matching of intents, where a valid transaction would satisfy all participants’ conditions simultaneously.
- Its also possible agents may want direct settlement from Ethereum or it’s L2 for example and may skip the step of setting up a local controller. This is entirely up to the agents. They could still benefit from batching intents in an atomic TX instead of submitting a TX for each preference.
Challenges
- Bootstrapping - Not enough agents participate in the Event Planner app. As a result there are limited options.
- Incentives - If there are competing side-events not using this method of credible commitments then some agents maybe incentivized to collude with them instead because the coordination game would be far simpler.
- Privacy - how do you plan a side event in stealth if you need to commit to hosting it sooner than later so the other agents can express their intents to participate?
- Capital efficiency - it might be capital inefficient to require multiple agents to post collateral to make their commitments credible. If the event is not held, and instead they could have not used this app and used a different method, they locked up capital for an unnecessarily long period without any compensation.
- Dominant Assurance contracts maybe worth exploring here whereby if the event organizer makes a credible commitment to host the event, but falls flat on ticket sales (doesn’t meet an agreed upon threshold) they pay out the other agents a refund bonus above their locked capital say the current federal funds rate.
- Dominant Assurance Contracts could also be used for option buyers whereby if the event is not held then they get a refund above their initial option they bought. This would be similar to crowdfunding mechanisms, where DA contracts make each option buyer more pivotal as the event gets closer to being funded. Since the option buyer knows they will get a refund bonus, they are incentivized to buy the option as its only risk is the solvency/credibility of the counterparty (the event organizer).
- Intent matching - how are multiple parties going to agree to the same terms and conditions for an event?
- there may have to be some standard intent formats for each agent to select from
Conclusion
We’ve discussed the problem of attention fragmentation as it relates to side events and motivated the problem space. Thereafter, we loosely sketched a potential Anoma application that can be built to solve this problem. The application maybe quite complex and there are various unanswered questions in the challenges section. One thought is this could be built either re-using the resource logic of Public Signal or building on top of Public Signal.
Curious what folks think. In particular, @michael @cwgoes @degregat @vveiln @Emily_Heliax @zach (at your leisure).
Note this is not comprehensive or complete and my thinking here maybe incorrect. You are welcome to constructively criticize/ correct/ critique. Undoubtedly, I think this would be a cool application with a clear product-market fit.