Two Weeks to Devcon’s Secret Agenda

It’s that time of the year when ethereans descend on a random city to attend the Ethereum Foundation organized Devcon conference.

It’s Osaka in Japan for Devcon5 at the ATC hall (pictured) which can accommodate about 3,000 people.

Tickets appear to have gone for about $1,200, or 5.84 eth, with numerous projects sponsoring Devcon, including quite a few potential competitors like Tezos and Casper Labs.

Whether that sponsorship buys them a speaking slot is not too clear because despite there being just two weeks left to go, we have no clue who will be speaking, about what and when.

Last year pretty much at the last minute some spreadsheet was put up with some four parallel talks at any one time.

So we might get the same this year with some complaints already being made regarding inclusion:

What role Hudson Jameson has regarding the conference is not too clear. He appears influential because he chairs the eth1 calls, but he is not a core dev and there are suggestions he actually has very little influence, if indeed any.

So this may well be the EF director’s decision to keep the agenda to the very last minute presumably so that we’re all distracted with the conference and don’t scrutinize what they plan to put up.

That was the tactic last year and ended up with perhaps the worst ethereum conference since it’s invention.

There were just too many parallel talks and far too many of those talks were just boring and there were no demos, no showcases of projects, etc.

Considering the above complain, it may be there are no demos this year either, with devcon risking becoming lecturecon.

That’s however potentially pre-judging because there’s nothing to judge currently.

People have to organize their week, where they going, what they seeing, and yet with just two weeks to go they have no clue whatever.

Not that it necessarily matters to those attending who will probably be there more to swap contact cards, but some of us remember a time when everyone had plenty of reasons to look forward to Devcon presentations.

Devcon 2016 for example was quite something. And Devcon 2017. Back then however EF had some competent people, while many seem to have left since.

Now they apparently can’t even put an agenda up. We hope that’s not because everyone will think it far too boring again, but while previously there were good reasons to start with high expectations, now it is perhaps best to start off with very very low expectations and hope for a pleasant surprise.

That all said, there is at least one thing to look forward to: the deposit smart contract launch. We presume, or at least hope, there will be plenty of eth 2.0 talks. If there is one by Nimbus and Lighthouse then it may make it for a worthwhile Devcon.

Spark Pool is a sponsor. They plan to launch a staking pool so if they’re giving a talk on it, that could be interesting.

Giving a podium to Chainlink again could be a curious decision, but the sponsors list does actually look interesting so we may well be proven wrong about low expectations once the agenda launches.

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