Hi lightning devs, Follow up on next year LN Summit organization: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2023-June/003994.html
After browsing the travel advisories, social situations of a good number of geographical areas in Africa, and chatting with the Built with Bitcoin folks on the state of the local Bitcoin community country by country, I would like to propose Ghana as a place of location for next year's June 2024 LN Summit. As announced in my previous mail, I was thinking to survey privately the usual Lightning Summit attendees on the choice of location to collect a first wave of feedback. After really digging into the travel advisories country by country, it turns out if we're looking for European / US-like standards of travel for a group of people of 30/40 attendees, we start to be more operationally constrained. Ghana has already hosted last year's Afro Bitcoin Conference and they're doing an edition again in December of this year [0]. I've never been to Ghana so I'm currently planning to attend this year's 2023 conference to get myself familiar with the ground and that way ensure smooth preparation for next year's June LN Summit. From my Zurich 2020 experience, it's good to organize Bitcoin technical events in a country where you're familiar a bit. As a backup plan, I think we could consider countries like Morocco or Algeria, which given current composition of the organization committee is straightforward due to the french-speaking communities, or South Africa, which is itself beautiful and where they're doing Bitcoin events [1], though this latter is very far far away in term of international travel logistic. Note for Ghana, from a quick look it sounds like a visa will be required for all Schengen, US and Commonwealth passport holders will need a travel visa. ECOWAS passport holders sound to be exempted. In terms of financial resources, Zurich 2020 hard logistical organization cost was around 10$k. My pleasure to cover the LN Summit 2024 hard logistical cost out of my pocket. For clarity, I'm speaking about the LN Summit which is an invitation-only event reserved to the Lightning developers and researchers based on technical proof-of-work of which the previous edition happens in Adelaide 2018, Berlin 2019 (one evening event on the sport), Zurich 2021 (covid edition), Oakland 2022 and NYC 2023. This is _not_ to be confused with the Lightning conference which has been traditionally organized by Fulmo, and of which the latest _official_ edition has been Berlin 2019 iirc. As it has been suggested by nully0x, it can be interesting to organize a co-event with Qala Africa, I'm already in touch with few folks there due to FOSS things and I'll reach out of band to them, though I'll take personal accountability on the LN Summit, _only, not any other satellite event around. Overall, I think it's wise for the 1st protocol dev event (CoreDev included [2]) beyond the US / Europe / Australia / Japan geographical boundaries to plan well ahead and start small. Cheers, Antoine [0] https://www.afrobitcoin.org [1] https://adoptingbitcoin.org/capetown-2024/ [2] https://coredev.tech/pastevents.html Le ven. 23 juin 2023 à 10:39, Antoine Riard <antoine.ri...@gmail.com> a écrit : > Hi lightning devs, > > Proposing myself to organize next year's LN Summit in Africa, with a rough > date somewhere in June 2024. > > There are a lot of reasons to hold a summit there. Africa is a beautiful > continent, there is a rich cultural and historical past, a lot of > fragmentation in the financial systems of the 56 states that can be solved > with a compatible payment protocol, an explosive demography with a lot of > energy to get things done, more and more Lightning developers coming from > this continent and formidable perspectives to grow "full-stack" local > Lightning economies. > > Usually, we don't announce the organization of CoreDev or LN Summit on > open communication channels, as there is a goal of serenity of the > engineering conversation (and as we would like to avoid being trolled by > BSV fans or tabloid-style of journalism). For this time, given the > operational challenges can be a bit more complex (e.g visas travels, > "tropical weather"), better to have this announced far ahead [0]. > Operations and financial resources should be okay, though nice if we have a > multi-stakeholder approach, "skin in the game" from a bunch of folks is the > best way to guarantee fairness and transparency of the process. > > If you have any objection to my personna contribution to the organization > of the LN Summit 2024, thanks for letting me know during the coming weeks, > either in public or on this thread, or privately by mail. As usual, I'll do > my best to set strong transparency and accountability standards. In matters > of open-source, talk is cheap, better to speak by your actions. > > With any project, the best advice is always to start small, so the first > step sounds to be to survey all the countries with reasonable operational > stability that can fit the location (Algeria, Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, > etc). I'll look into it and share the feedback privately to the Lightning > attendees (based on neutral and technical proof of works heuristics), > somewhere at the end of the summer. > > Setted up a dedicated communication endpoint for this: > lnsummit2...@ariard.me > > If you're a LN dev, don't hesitate to reach out if you wanna to be part of > the organization, this is a good opportunity to transfer knowledge between > generations of contributors. > > Cheers, > Antoine > > [0] Already co-organized the CoreDev event in Zurich back in 2021 so I do > have already the operational templates. >
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