Atlanta Bitcoin conference planners move to open source their agenda

Decentralization and open source software are two of Bitcoin’s core tenets, but industry conferences tend to be centralized affairs, usually funded, sponsored, planned and coordinated by companies and protocol teams.

Now there is a new effort underway to decentralize what may be the most basic, but often quite political, element of conference planning – the agenda.

Two crypto leaders are organizing what they describe as the first “open source” conference for Bitcoin developers, in a reimagining of the TABConf gathering that has been held for the past five years in Atlanta.

TABConf 2023 in September will allow members of the public to recommend which topics they want discussed and which speakers they want to hear from, according to event planners.

“Anyone can open an issue, and the issues are not chosen based on whether a sponsor decides to give us money, or whether a person has a certain status in the community,” said Brandon Iglesias, co-founder of TABConf LLC, the company behind the event. “The issues are selected solely on merit.”

TABConf grew out of a series of popular Atlanta Bitcoin meetups organized by Iglesias and Michael Tidwell. Iglesias also serves as director of product at decentralized storage firm Storj Labs, and Tidwell is director of infrastructure at Bitcoin gaming and payments firm Zebedee.

The conference debuted in 2018. Last year, TABConf had over 500 attendees and dozens of speakers, including a panel featuring Bitcoin Core developers Andrew Chow, Gloria Zhao, Murch and Pieter Wuille. Developer Jeremy Rubin talked about Bitcoin smart contracts. Ruben Somsen discussed Silent Payments – easily reusable addresses that can receive multiple payments from different people without compromising their privacy. Zebedee CTO André Neves gave the keynote address.

Historically, the responsibility of coming up with an agenda for the conference has fallen on the shoulders of Iglesias, Tidwell and a handful of other organizers.

What makes the 2023 event different is that anyone can submit a recommendation for a speaker or topic through the conference’s GitHub repository, making it the first open source Bitcoin conference, according to Iglesias.

“What we’re doing is we’re letting people go on to a GitHub repository and submit ideas for workshops and panels and talks that they want to either see at the conference or give at the conference,” Iglesias told CoinDesk in an interview. “This is all public and transparent.”

More than 20 people have already submitted suggestions (referred to as “issues” on GitHub). David Samson, an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Toronto, wants to discuss “The Human Trust Paradox” – a conversation about the evolution of human trust and finally to “highlight the newest innovation of the trust paradox – Proof of Work.”

Naval Kohen, a graduate student in mathematics at Indiana University, submitted a proposal for a workshop on zero-knowledge proofs—a cryptographic technique used to prove the validity of information without revealing the information itself. Kohen previously worked as a software engineer at Suredbits, a firm specializing in bitcoin derivatives.

Participants will be able to support submissions by adding likes and comments to each proposal (here’s an example). Conference organizers will then select proposals with the most engagement a month before the event. Relevance and the amount of effort put into a proposal will also affect selection.

“The level of detail and time potential speakers put into their cases will show and help us determine which cases will provide the most value to TABConf 2023 attendees,” explained Iglesias. “If we don’t pick an issue with a lot of conversations or emojis compared to the rest, at least the participants have transparency and can hold us accountable.”

So control will ultimately still be up to the organizers, but it will likely end up being much more community-driven than is usually the case.