While more lightning developers attending conference(s) in a more diverse set of countries,
including on the african continent, sounds like a great idea, the usual LN summit is an invite-only
developer meeting. Hosting it in a country with additional requirements for travel and which isn't
as well-served by direct international flights doesn't carry any benefit and only has additional
costs on peoples' time.
I'm also admittedly a little dubious of any summit or conference organized by someone who does not
live in the city in which it is being hosted.
Matt
On 8/18/23 4:02 PM, Antoine Riard wrote:
Hi lightning devs,
Follow up on next year LN Summit organization:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2023-June/003994.html
<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 <https://www.afrobitcoin.org>
[1] https://adoptingbitcoin.org/capetown-2024/
<https://adoptingbitcoin.org/capetown-2024/>
[2] https://coredev.tech/pastevents.html <https://coredev.tech/pastevents.html>
Le ven. 23 juin 2023 à 10:39, Antoine Riard <antoine.ri...@gmail.com
<mailto: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
<mailto: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.
_______________________________________________
Lightning-dev mailing list
Lightning-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lightning-dev
_______________________________________________
Lightning-dev mailing list
Lightning-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lightning-dev
