Aracon 2020 AGP pre-proposal

Hi everyone!

Given the great feedback we’ve received after Aracon 2019, we have been exploring the organization of a second edition in 2020.

Therefore, the Aragon Association would like to submit a Finance track AGP proposal to fund the budget for Aracon 2020.

We aim to propose to the community to provide up to €295k of funding for the execution of the conference.

We have already done some internal work at the AA to broadly define what the event would look like, after taking into consideration feedback and learning from 2019’s edition, and in turn what it would probably cost to fund it.

Dates

We are aiming for the month of June 2020

Location

While Berlin is a great spot in terms of community, availability of venues, connections and prices, Aragon is a completely distributed organization and community, so we think it’s only fitting that we organize the conference in a different place each year.

We have asked feedback to the community, and it doesn’t seem that we would be able to attract a lot of people to places like South or Central America. With the current situation in the USA, and our limited reach in Asia at this point, Europe seems like the best place for it.

At this time, the #1 choice would be Lisbon, while keeping the “easier” option of replicating Berlin in case we are not able to find something that could have the level of execution we had this year.

Lisbon is interesting because of its ease of access and logistics, its growing scene, the availability of venues, and still reasonable prices.
Conflicting conferences are also a major factor, and we are in touch with the organizers of EthLisbon and the Lisbon Blockchain Week, which would happen at around the same time. It seems like a good idea to combine the efforts.

This is still not set in stone, and we could reconsider to somewhere else if there was some particularly good reason to.

Agenda

We are planning on switching a bit the format. 2019 was a 2 day event, and while it was awesome, it is a big commitment from people that are not 100% focused on Aragon. Therefore, the plan would be to switch to a 1+1 event agenda. One main day of conference, and a smaller second day event to be filled with community meetings, workshops, demos, and similar content.
This should help reduce the costs associated with the venue and the food.

Organizers

We have been lucky to be able to re-confirm the 2019 organizer, Lucija Matic, who would be ready to take care of the full organization of the conference, with the help of the Aragon team.

Budget

We have also budgeted what it would cost, based on the costs we had this year and the proposed changes in the Agenda.

Topic € Notes
Please note that costs estimates are conservative, as well as the revenues from the ticket sales
Venue €40,000.00 This is a complete estimate, as we have yet to define where
AV €70,000.00 This is on the high side, but we have been very happy with the service, and doubt we could get anything similar for much lower a price
Food €90,000.00 People eat a lot, but we might be able to get lower than this
Furniture rental €10,000.00
Entertainment €3,000.00
Event Documentation €20,000.00
Marketing €5,000.00
Decoration €5,000.00
Guest services €10,000.00
Organizers €50,000.00 Estimate, the AA can subsidize some part of this from its budget.
Buffer €40,000.00
Total €343,000.00
— —
Ticket sales €50,000.00
— —
Total €293,000.00 (USD 325k)

Address of the transfer recipient

  • An ad-hoc Aracon DAO, or the Events DAO

Amount of the transfer

  • Up to €295k equivalent of DAI

Number and frequency of transfers if recurring (enter “1” if only one payment will be made)

  • One time transfer
  • What wouldn’t be used, would be returned to the main multisig
  • Fiat expenses would be incurred by the Association and reimbursed by the DAO to the AA DAO

Purpose of the transfer

  • To fund the development of Aracon 2020

Recipient information

  • An internal DAO managed by the Aragon Association

Comments

We welcome all input from the community. While we believe the 2019 Aracon provided a lot of value to all community members, we understand that this is a substantial investment - and therefore would like to hear what people think about it in order to make this a better proposal.

Thanks!

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Hi Stefano, a few questions:

  • In terms of attendees is the anticipated size of the event about the same as AraCon 2019? I recall many days last year being on the stressful side because in hindsight I believe the organizing team was under-staffed relative to the size of the event. I see you have budgeted €50k for organizers and am wondering if this takes into account the number of full/part time team members that will actually be required to pull this off given the anticipated size of the event without stretching them so thin as was the case last year.

One main day of conference, and a smaller second day event to be filled with community meetings, workshops, demos, and similar content.
This should help reduce the costs associated with the venue and the food.

  • Is the idea here that the second day will be a smaller attendance, and so less will need to be spent on venue and food?

Address of the transfer recipient

  • An ad-hoc Aracon DAO, or the Events DAO
  • Something to keep in mind, is the current status of DAOs puts “unlimited liability” on each member. There is a lot that could potentially go wrong at a conference-scale event, and so I think it would be worth investigating and thinking about how to structure the funding side in such a way to protect organizers from legal liability that may arise as the result of some tragedy that could possibly befall the event. I’m not saying I know for sure that funding it via DAO would make DAO members liable in case of a lawsuit - IANAL - I am saying I don’t know and it’s worth thinking about it.

Thanks for the questions!

We are anticipating a similarly sized attendance, but yeah true about the last one. Here the event-specific staffing is taken into account in the venue and guest services line items - as well as requiring some more involvement from the Aragon team members.

Correct.

Absolutely, this would be an AA “owned” DAO, just for accounting and execution purposes. The AA would still sign the contracts and transactions should happen after the contracting is done.

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