Meeting Notes from visit to Factory / Decentralized Culture Room - 30 July 2018

[chrishobcroft]

Attending: Thomas Nau (Factory / Events), Roman Conrad (Factory / Technical), Chris Hobcroft (Livepeer), Stina Gustafsson (ETHBerlin), Alex Boerger, Petra Wenglarzyova, Victoria Priester, Addie Ogunwole (OST).

The Space

We visited the area allocated to the culture room.

All were happy with the space - with some notes:

1. Sound treatment - Victoria noted that the acoustics in the rooms were not ideal for sound installation, but suggested that they could be treated. See this issue for more details. Furthermore, it was generally agreed that amplification should be limited, and also that drums should be minimised.

2. Advertising - it was noted that because the space was on the third floor, and relatively "out of the way" that we would need to "get creative" with ways to bring people. Some ideas shared

   • Broadcast music from the music room on speakers in e.g. the other areas - e.g. cafeteria
   • Follow the white rabbit / follow the blockchain - visual clues to help hackers get to the culture room
   • Verbally communicating to the community of hackers e.g. the taskforce can be asking "did you see the culture room yet? you didn't...?" :)

3. Lighting - it was noted that the lighting in parts of the rooms might need to be altered - but this would be largely dependent on what was planned to happen in the rooms.

4. Different rooms - it was broadly agreed to allocate 5 different rooms to the following:

   • Music - for musical performances to entertain.

     • Some ideas for performers were discussed, more can be found here.

   • Nature - to introduce nature into the event somehow, helping hackers reconnect with the source

     • Petra mentioned an idea to grow something, e.g. in the shape of Ethereum logo. Would need a space to grow this in. Suggested the rooftop of the new Ethereum Foundation office.
     • Addie expressed much interest in being involved with planning and creating the nature room!
     • See this issue for more notes / ideas / questions on this.

   • Fine Art / Sculpture - to bring something different?

     • Stina mentioned some Berlin-based artists working with Sound (Ewan) and Internet Art (Sebastian)

   • Hacker DIY / Workshops - to allow the hackers to collaborate / participate in some kind of creativity.

     • One idea share by Alex was a "Best of Blockchain" installation e.g. centred around the first page from Satoshi's Bitcoin white paper (worth reading if you haven't already), and allowing hackers to add printouts of their "best" things of Blockchain.
     • Another idea from Alex was to invite his friend who works on projects relating to awareness of movement, to help hackers become more aware of their movement
     • Screen printing - give hackers the ability to print e.g. Ethereum / Sponsor branding on their own t-shirts / clothes (possibly a bit messy?)
     • Also, ideas about Virtual Reality workshops, and workshops to make their own musical instruments might be cool.

   • Freedom Room - a venue for freedom of speech and expression without restriction

     • mirroring the open-source and permissionless nature of the ecosystem we are working within.
     • When a participant enters the room it will be empty, and we kindly ask them to leave it as they found it.

Other Notes

• Culture outside the Culture Room - it was agreed that we should also be looking for opportunities to introduce culture in other parts of the venue, e.g. in the outdoor spaces, and in the cafeteria.

• Website - it was discussed about getting a section on the ethberlin.com website, dedicated to information about the Culture Room. Alex to discuss with MP.

Actions:

• Stina to discuss with MP re: allocating the 5 rooms and the space immediately outside, to be "Culture Room"
• Chris to help Stina get connected to Github
• Victoria and Alex to connect re: t-shirt screen printing
• All - to get working with Github
• Chris to connect Addie with Petra re: Nature Room (done)
• SG to finalise 1-pager for MP to attempt to secure sponsorship

Please add comments if there is stuff you would like to add, or clarify.

Please add new issues in the repositories to create space to collaborate.

[slgsson]

Re actions:

• Location has been discussed with Maria and it has been confirmed that we can use the 5 rooms. We might need to allow for judges to access one of the rooms at some point towards the end, but I don't see that as problem. Thoughts?
• 1-pager for funding application finalised two weeks ago

Longer concept has been uploaded here - https://github.com/decentralizedcultureroom/concept It very open and covers everything that we've discussed in the previous meeting.