Call for Sponsorship of a local Ethereum event: Solidity 0.5 walkthrough at Progressbar in Bratislava, Slovakia

• Rich meetups, poor meetups
• Progressbar in Bratislava, Slovakia
• Call for sponsorship of their upcoming Event : Solidity 0.5 walkthrough

Rich meetups, poor meetups.

During DevCon4, we hosted a series of events through our platform and many people liked our simple concept demonstrating the power of smart contract (or the simple fact that they got more ETH just by turning up).

More importantly, we are very grateful that the majority of event organisers paid for our service (1 euro per 1 RSVP during DevCon4 which is subject to change).The amount is decided through various conversations with dozens of organisers who filled in our early access form. While some organisations had enough budget to cover our fee, it is not a trivial amount for others who have less or no sponsorship.

We also received multiple requests for paid events. Their intentions are mostly to cover the cost of drinks and snacks rather than intending to make a profit. This means that the difference between free events and small fee events are just the lack of enough sponsorship, as newly formed meetups or rural meetups lacks enough stream of sponsorship as compared to big meetups in big cities. Is there any way we can help these organisers to get enough sponsorship so that they can afford to pay us while making the meetup itself more sustainable?

That’s pretty much what I was thinking throughout DevCon4 and that’s when I met Matej who runs a hackerspace & co-working space called “Progressbar” in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Progressbar in Bratislava, Slovakia

Bratislava has a nice balance between huge city & village. Everyday something is happening in Bratislava — events, concerts, art expositions, parties, meetups so on. Bratislava has lots of parks & green areas where you can go & feel like you’re in nature & escape the rush of the “world” . Bratislava has really nice historical city centre with lots of really good restaurants that are affordable, plus our co-working space is in this area.

A legendary hackerspace in Bratislava, Progressbar is the centre of the cryptocurrency community in Slovakia with the biggest draw for tech people — having organized Bitcoin events back in the days since 2012, or hosting Vitalik way before it was cool.

Progressbar is a space where you can fully concentrate on your work. You basically have everything you need — work there & enjoy nice street view on Dunajska street, do pull ups on the pull up bar, have meetings in our new glass meeting room with whiteboard & projector, take calls in a call room, rest in our chill zone on the bags & couch area, organize event & meet ups as we have all necessary equipment like projectors, microphones, speakers, lots of chairs & tables (ideal for tech meetup). Progressbar is mainly a co-working space, but in the evening the space hosts events. Sometimes co-workers like to network so they just bring some drinks to the space & have private parties that anyone can be a part of.

Recently Progressbar is embracing using public issues for transparency using github issues — showcasing the community over proprietary mediums https://instagram.com/progressbar_sk and our semi-private Progressbar Daily album.

Their upcoming events can be found at their events page and facebook page.

Progressbar has Python meetups on monthly basis, but anything tech related is welcome. They have hosted a Bitcoin quiz, Cryptowine, Hacktoberfest, Crypto meetup, Stellar meetup, Ethereum meetup, Bitcoin meetup, Machine Learning meetups, Nodeschool Bratislava and recently hosted valuable guests Vlad Zamfir, Amir Taaki and Harry Halpin with great talk about Politics of Cryptoanarchy and Governance. About twice a week there are events in Progressbar. During weekends the space is used by companies that hold trainings there, for example Hemisfera (camp program, where they teach kids to code) was training their new teachers for 3 weekends Progressbar has also been hosting ESA Copernicus as well. In the future they would like to be testbed for Ethereum ecosystem & projects in real world.

Call for sponsorship of their upcoming Event : Solidity 0.5 walkthrough

We have a joint proposal between Progressbar and Kickback. Matej is currently planning a meetup in Mid December where they dive into the new features of Solidity 0.5 featuring Gleb Urvanov.

Speaker: Gleb Urvanov

Bio: Software developer, qualified specialist in field of information technologies with experience in project management. During the last 7 years has been working as a software engineer for private and state companies, including Ministry of Defence of Russian Federation. Used to work on a team in an Agile environment as well as solitaire, solving critical tasks. Besides extensive experience within different commercial projects, he has won several national awards in scientific and professional areas. A Blockchain enthusiast, Gleb participated in a several cryptocurrency-related startups as a smart contract developer. He has spoken at five international conferences in the field of computer science and was the youngest speaker at the international conference of robotics in Sochi — 2014

The event currently has no sponsorship, but we are currently open to organisations who can sponsor €300 to cover drinks, foods, and the fee to use Kickback.

Matej and I had a bit of brainstorming and here are the list of things we can potentially offer in exchange for the sponsorship

• Your company logo on Kickback event page
• A few minutes slot to talk about your company (they are planning to livestream using facebook live)
• If they manage to edit video, have your company logo at the beginning of the video
• Interview or articles about your organisation on Kickback (here are the examples)

This is a bit of experiment to see if there is any appetite for global blockchain companies and projects to reach out and sponsor remote and locally organised meetups in support of the ecosystem.

If you would like to be a sponsor, please contact matej.nemcek@geefu.net

NOTE: If you are interested in simply donating than sponsoring an event, you can donate at their donation page.