"sub0 RESET" @Devcon Bangkok - back to the roots

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Proposal for a reimagined Sub0 developer conference, with a fresh brand identity and a targeted focus on grassroots, Web3 hacker culture.

WebZero outlines a new concept for sub0, Polkadot’s staple developer conference. Consisting of a 3-day conference, evening events, a Web3 educators’ day, and a 72-hour hacker space managed by WebZero’s developer relations team. This proposal places “Substrate” as the pillar technology stack that powers blockchains like Starknet’s Madara, Cardano’s L2 Midnight, Polygon’s Avail (incubated), Entropy, Tanssi, Bittensor, and AlephZero with Polkadot being the biggest contributor to and user of Substrate.

Contact: info@joinwebzero.com ~ WebZero TG Chat

→ [Full proposal](Sub0 RESET - V3 - Google Docs)
→ Requested amount: $ 437,560.00 USDC
→ Track record:Link to sheet with all WebZero funded events (including Polkadot + other ecosystem sponsorships)

1. Key Changes to the existing format

What: Grassroots vs. corporate → Prioritize “hacking” culture.
How: Venue selection, branding, pricing, budget, agenda curated by ChaosDAO and hackers, outreach to the existing WebZero “Blockspace” developer base. This is not “a 2nd Decoded”.

What: Free tickets, food and drinks → Break down barriers to entry.
How: Catering by the WebZero chef, hiring local staff, sourcing quality vendors at fair prices.

What: Upgraded layout & experience design → Designing the venue layout with creative installations (eg. live merch printing, merch customisation, art gallery), curated booth areas, two cozy stages, networking & co-working areas open day/night.
How: Venue scouting, artist curation, agenda curation with ChaosDAO

What: Budget transparency → Provide invoices of all expenses up to two months post-event.
How: By using our standard event budget sheet for reporting.

What: Budget efficiency → Plan and execute an event within the budget of $ 437,560.000 USDC.
How: Offsetting costs with sponsors (one of the success metrics), hiring local, working with an in-house team (no 3rd parties), hiring a smaller venue.

What: Smaller venue/higher attendance → >400 guests per day.
How: Cost efficient venue, partnerships with local universities, (other) partner onboarding Devcon outreach and cross-ecosystems promotions, creating a tailored marketing campaign with ecosystem stakeholders.

What: Substrate Beyond Polkadot → Bring together the top Substrate-based projects from across the ecosystem.
How: Evaluate and reach out to other ecosystems and projects building with Substrate for a more interesting intersection of communities and discussions.

What: All side events. In one place → Open the venue out to sponsors for hosting side events and/or community members.
How: Hosting an opening or closing party, keeping the bar open after the conference hours.

What: Substrate onboarding → Bring more developers to Substrate.
How: Creative and gamified developer challenges, setting up a dedicated booth for new devs and companies where they can inquire about building.

What: Accessible event location, next to a large conference → Dates selected just before Devcon in Bangkok.
How: Bangkok was chosen as the location because it coincides with Devcon, has fewer visa restrictions, lower costs, and is close to the conference venue and the city centre.

2. Benefits for Polkadot:

More for less → More perks at a lower budget.
Improved collaboration → Multiple substrate-based ecosystems in one place.
Higher community involvement → Collaboratively selected agenda.
Improved developer engagement → A dedicated DevRel team for onboarding new and experienced builders at the conference.

We look forward to hearing the community’s comments and suggestions.

Disclaimer:
We have established a new multisig wallet (1ntrYvz7gmd59Qv1ngdcwAupV4cY8DPMkMJBiPA2YUiVXvE) with our technical team members as signatories.
ID approval is currently pending through People Chain.

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As someone who will attend Devcon, I belive this has all the chances to be a great event.

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Looks good, would like to see it more clearly what dates you are suggesting and in what location. Took me too long to find WHERE and WHEN :stuck_out_tongue:

I like the overall approach and thought put into the proposal :slight_smile:

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Awesome, glad to see some variety in events leadership. Great to get non-corporate! Whoa, a chef! People actually coding? Food! Hurry up and get this venue locked down so people get there early =)

Other events at Devcon for Polkadot people:

Devcon 7 Tickets on sale here – they tend to run out.

Hope you find a good venue soon.

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Hi guys! i like the idea seems more reasonable the budgets, have a hackaton, have presence in diferents continents.
Only one thing! please work with the local comunities give them the oportunity to search developers web 3 or web 2 to introduce blockchain thanks to Polkadot, Will be amazing if this local comunities have a little budget for exemple 5K-10K to sponsor new developers from the country where the Sub 0 be.
here my 2 cent

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Hi WebZero team, thanks for your proposal.

I think this reset is necessary with better vibe of the conference, focusing on people & people relationship (especially with new relationship establishment).

Despite we already had a plan with our local partner to implement a small networking side event during DevCon and Thailand Blockchain Week - you can check the plan here, definitely we can adjust to have a better approach.

My team at OpenGuild - the open communities for Web 3.0 builders currently focusing on Southeast Asia market is more than happy to be a part of this initiative with some key focused deliverables:

  • Local Community Partners Invitation => meaning we get more local media partnership/KOLs to come to Polkadot Sub0. Not just Thailand but could be more in broader SEA people (as long as the conference open for free)

  • Managing deliverables of media partners to promote Sub0.

  • Negotiating with media team (videography + photography) and local Emcees for affordable price + high quality outcome when we know the very well the people here and it’s much more easy to negotiate between local with local.

  • Provide tech content support + Asian dev relation members to establish panel discussion topic through combining local builder perspectives or communicate with any developers coming to the event.

We already had a conversation about this but I think it’s important to establish a community acknowledgement about this potential collaboration and proceed in a best approach.

Regards,
Cris.

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Hi @BRA16dott thanks a lot for your feedback! Do you have any specific communities in mind for Bangkok? We plan to make the event free for attendees, could you elaborate a bit on how you envision this sponsorship to look like?

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Can’t edit the forum post right now, but now it’s easy to find in the proposal document :upside_down_face:

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I agree very much with the basic idea of this proposal, but am not sure about the branding.

Substrate got renamed to Polkadot-SDK. Yes there are still external teams calling it Substrate, but they often do that as to not associate themselves with Polkadot.

Maybe this is a good thing, since it allows people who are not Polkadot supporters to join?
Otherwise it should maybe be branded as a Polkadot Hackathon.

Substrate onboarding → Bring more developers to Substrate

Is this what we want? Personally I would like to bring more people to Polkadot :smile:
So am basically asking what are the advantages for Polkadot - not for its source code kit named Substrate.

PS: Maybe this direct profit thinking is also not that helpful here. As with Decoded: a lot of people did not come over from the ETH event because it was called “Polkadot Decoded” and they did not like Polkadot. So maybe keeping the name a bit more subtle is good.

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agree, Polkadot SDK or bust.

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What we want to ensure is to be as welcoming and open to other innovators in web3. And from what we’ve seen from our Blockspace events, a lot of these people might know or be curious about Polkadot, but their roots are in other ecosystems. Our role is to connect them with tech they might be interested in, not to impose anything specific.

With sub0-Reset it’s different because it is “the Polkadot developer conference” after all. What we’re trying to achieve with positioning the conference around Substrate is to cast a wider net around innovators that might know of or be curious to build with Substrate based systems.

We believe that Substrate, no matter the intended branding around Polkadot SDK is what will bring more people to the Polkadot ecosystem. This bottom up approach aligns nicely with the hacker culture we’re pushing. The attention span of a developer is a lot longer if you’re talking about core library capabilities than it is if you’re trying to explain what Polkadot is etc. In the future, “Substrate” might really become a symbol for a whole bunch of libraries that power the web (we’ll see Solana, AVA, Move VMs, Cardano integrations to Polkadot probably via lower level libraries, UTXO libraries etc). Today it symbolizes an umbrella that casts much wider that Polkadot node implementations. We want to preserve that.

I would go further and say: the cultural fabric of Polkadot is not so much the brand of Polkadot itself. Its the rich builder audience and active development on horizons that extend the capabilities of the Polkadot SDK. There is also a strange cultural phenomenon I’ve witnessed that certain teams using Substrate would rather not associate themselves with Polkadot. We want to avoid any sense of non-inclusion and address anything that could pose a risk to making all builders feel welcome.

That being said, this discussion only really matters if there is a strong reason to brand the event as a “Polkadot SDK” event. In the end, we foresee pushing content around more fundamental topics such as P2P networking, studying different SDKs, sessions focussed on FRAME development, consensus systems etc. Generally most of which will adopt an approach to focus on the topic before jumping into the SDK or relevant library.

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@Sacha @OliverTY This discussion of Substrate vs. Polkadot SDK is quite a complicated one, I will chime in.

Personally, I don’t like sunsetting Substrate as a brand, but it is the safer thing to do. I have stated it recently here. Nonetheless, I haven’t given up on keeping it firmly as a part of Polkadot-SDK either, for example here.

The idea of Substrate as the neutral backbone of Polkadot is super cool. And for many years, Parity invested greatly into making Substrate powerful and independent of Polkadot. I am personally proud of all the effort done here. The fact that Substrate is used to build Solochains as well is a net positive event for Polkadot as a whole.

But, the main flaw of the structure is that there is no team out there that maintains Substrate+FRAME truly independent of its identity as a part of Polkadot-SDK. This means that a single team has one foot in the mindset of “Substrate is independent” and one foot in “Polkadot SDK ftw”, with a clear verdict that if it comes to it, the latter is more important.

In other words, a single team (atm Parity organization) cannot be tasked with both:

  1. Maintain substrate as an independent project
  2. Make it fulfill every need of Polkadot

This will inevitably lead to clashes both in branding and technical aspects, and we have seen that in the last year or so.

So, I think the only way out is to acknowledge that we cannot have both, and then acknowledge that if we are to chose one, for now, Polkadot SDK is better/more-important than Substrate. This is how I came to my current conclusion.

Yet, in more practical terms, we cannot erase Substrate from the face of internet. I think we should keep the keyword, and use it, but always in the shadow of Polkadot SDK. This both conveys the branding idea that this is “part of Polkadot”, and the technical idea “it is unopinionated, but also very much made to make Polkadot happen”.

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Its wonderful to band the Substrate ecosystem together, but to point out the obvious: many Polkadot OpenGov voters may vote against Polkadot Treasury funds being allocated to sub0’s that promote non-Polkadot entities, arguing that DOT token holders will not directly benefit and may even be hurt when non-Polkadot entities give little back in return. This may put the Polkadot flagship conference in jeopardy unnecessarily.

Or, in some basic sense, the other entities must somehow “pay their fair share” in DAO-to-DAO alliance to cover this concern.

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Parity is doing it quite successfully for now, there is already quite some project using substrate but not polkadot.

If we think about freemium business model. Substrate is the free part, being on polkadot is the premium costing DOT. Parity doesn’t need to acknowledge not being able to pursue substrate as it is. And it is to be expected that polkadot is prioritized.

I don’t think substrate needs to be under an independant organization to be a viable freemium product.

The premium is to be able to communicate efficiently to all other cynical rollups, and have security provided.

Now about such dev events I don’t know what is the best marketing.

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Treasury funds would not finance the facilitation of projects outside the ecosystem. They would have to pay a form of sponsorship. I want to highlight that one of our metrics is offsetting the proposed cost by 10% with sponsorships.

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The shape of that seems reasonable, but this will something to haggle over very soon: is 10% really enough? Cardano has a marketcap bigger than Polkadot (I know, != Midnight, but…), BitTensor has a typical marketcap greater than most parachains combined, and so on…

Its not that easily settled. I’ll bet 10% will look cheap to them and expensive to Polkadot OpenGov voters. Good luck!

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I think you misunderstood me. We aim to offset far more than 10%, but this is what we noted down as the metric in the ref. AFAIK nobody has previously attempted something similar.

Additionally, the sponsorship packages have not even been drafted yet, and they will certainly not aim only to raise 10% of the indexed budget, but far more, as much as possible, to be precise.

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That, everyone can like.

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Looks like the proposal got executed.

What are the new steps here?