2021 Wrap up: The Good, the Bad, the Learnings for next time

[scottAnselmo]

Good:

• Amazing room placement
• The loading dock made moving items in/out a piece of cake
• The rental van was cheap and effective
• We had plenty of booklets
• Quite good support from Goons who periodically stopped in to ask if we needed anything; QM was very generous
• We were under budget by about $3500 (Mostly from conservative swag purchases due to the uncertainty of miscellaneous costs, and a volunteer dropping out)
• We could lock the main doors with private access to secure equipment (not like Skyview.)
• Party village interfacing was quite good as well
• The cryptocurrency village banners were good
• The plinko board was a lot of fun and drew attention
• The trivia drew in a crowd
• Everything that was printed on paper (both items) was very well made
• There was a lot of audience appreciation for Sarang's well chosen topics
• The other projects who attended the village seemed to enjoy the experience
• The room layout was really really good, much better than a speaker stage layout (The layout was nearly optimal, and we got great compliments from top Goons for it)
• XMR.radio was good background music
• Music licensing covered by XMR.radio / DEF CON
• Seth stepping up to run the welcome table all of Saturday was a huge help
• We had a separate dedicated chat to coordinate meetups
• Oversize vehicle parking at Planet Hollywood worked well enough, but would be more difficult at other places I think

Bad:

• Not opening the Discord - clearly this was unused, and we didn't have a good plan for how to really use it either
• AV recordings are pretty much crap
• We didn't have enough help Friday
• It was really hard to get other projects to show, especially because of the vaccine policy
• As a result, about half of the table space for conversations was unused
• Power supply in the room was terrible, requiring massive amounts of extra cables and hours of taping for safety
• "Really not 100% on the Monero Hardware setup. Don't want to open a whole can of worms about this right now, but I think we should revisit a vendor policy, especially if they want travel grants"
• We were unable to attract any local volunteers from the university despite outreach
• We had no Synlab collaboration as well. Synlab is the local hackerspace. ...despite outreach.
• One goon reacted quite negatively to bringing in food for a staff to eat for lunch since they didn't have time to leave during the days since they were busy, so food remains a stupid challenge
• Half the building doors were not able to be locked, because they were on a temporary wall. However to reach those doors a person needed to pass through other mostly locked areas (so half negative problem.)
• Losing the black bag
• A bit of social engineering from the union AV subcontractor trying to encourage Defcon to pay thousands for our unplanned AV failure (lack of a power cable.)
• We didn't make good use of the wonderful private pool deal at Bally's.
• No badge and limited merch
• No CTF
• "There were no very cool ajs style films and videos. I missed that a lot"

Learnings for next time:

• Rotation schedule – it would be nice if peps had allocated duty time slots and breaks
• Badges – msvb-mob worked so hard on the badges and appreciate everything he has done for us. Perhaps we could try to solicit volunteers with soldering skills to help ease up some of his workload.
• Audio – On the last day RCA cable failed, it should be replaced with XLR cables
• Pre-party refreshments – ajs went down to the liquor store and bought two litters of vodka and cranberry juice. It was gone within 5 minutes. Next year, we could budget for a larger batch or even get a quarter keg.
• Chatter and noise during talks – Close doors and peps heading tables should ask people to keep it down.
• Snacks and drinks – Budget for coffee, snacks (pizza, protein bars, donuts) for staff... an army marches on its stomach.
• Communication – Morning briefings set time before opening doors where everyone comes together to go over schedule of events and discuss plan of attack... dedicated Wire group for village updates, schedule changes, badges, events/parties, swag, and other important information (central source of info).
• Internet – Defcon/hotel wifi is not very reliable. Budget for a dedicated Monero Village 4G LTE hotspot.
• Stagenet – We need used laptop/mini-pc to host stagenet as a service.
• Logistics – Budget for moving truck to pick up and drop off supplies.
• Bring some superglue
• Better communication and information sharing between different workgroups (Tari, Globee, hardware people, volunteers, party planners, and Defcon people)
• More balanced workload... delegate tasks to more people
• Reduce quantity and increase quality of free stuff
• Designated floor manager with more established responsibilities
• Gamify free swag - to get stuff, you need to complete tasks, e.g. mine stagenet coins, make a stagenet transaction, sign/verify message.
• Use a small beamer we project the schedule of the day on one of the walls, using the village website page. Clearly identified person(s) is responsible to update website which gets reflected right away on wall.
• Have a clear Village press contact email or point of contact to make it easy to contact organizers
• Test AV recordings before talks begin to make sure quality matches standards
• Start badge and CTF planning much sooner

[scottAnselmo]

Have a clear Village press contact email or point of contact to make it easy to contact organizers