Add unSYSTEM Bitcoin conference to bitcoin.org

[genjix]

Hi!

I represent a team of organisers for the Bitcoin conference in Europe titled:

Bitcoin 2013: unSYSTEM - See http://unsystem.net

I've organised the last 2 conferences held in Prague (http://bitgroups.org/) and the last one in London called bitcoin2012. Both conferences were a success with 150 and 400 attendees respectively and were featured on the bitcoin.org homepage.

Vice magazine wrote about bitcoin2012:

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/printable-guns-grey-matters-and-masked-hackers

It would be a nice gesture to put Europe's largest Bitcoin event alongside the largest US event for Bitcoin.

unSYSTEM represents the voice of a growing side of Bitcoin users, who see Bitcoin as primarily a social tool.

[mikegogulski]

ACK, and looking forward to the event.

[amiller]

+1, ACK, w/ev. I'm missing the San Jose conference but planning to attend this one!

[luke-jr]

I think it should be added (maybe not so soon), but have concerns about the content of the linked website. It seems to be promoting radical political movements ("Occupy") and - at least implicitly - criminal organizations ("anonymous").

[pstratem]

ACK

[joecoin]

ACK.
Is it really not mentioned there yet?

[joecoin]

@luke-jr since you are promoting extremist religious fundamentalism I believe you should not oppose valid and acknowledged political and societal movements and views here only because they seem radical, criminal, sinful or whatever in your catholic view.
Thank you!
Joe

[jaromil]

Unity, even among diversity, is what can make such an ambitious project as Bitcoin strong. This issue is not just about breaking the legacy of Bitcoin conferences (which by itself is not advisable), but also about betraying the constituency behind it - which in a way or another is per-se political - or biopolitical, I argue in this article http://www.dyndy.net/2013/04/bitcoin-ends-the-taboo-on-money/

I strongly advise to include the European track of conferences. A political split would definitely mean the death of Bitcoin, a project that - like it or not - has gained momentum on political stances. The world is not just made of numbers.

[luke-jr]

@joecoin I'm not "promoting extremist religious fundamentalism". If you don't think "Occupy" is radical, or that "anonymous" is criminal, then you must be speaking a language other than English...

[mikehearn]

Guys, keep it about the content please.

This looks good to me. Saivann, what do you think? It might be better to have a News or Events section rather than tacking conference banners onto the bottom of every page, but I guess better organisation of these things can be discussed in a separate bug/pullreq.

@luke-jr Let me explain why I am supporting this patch. In other related discussions recently, one of the things I said is that the best way to make everyone happy is to have clear delineation between "This is about Bitcoin the payments system" and "This is about Bitcoin and social/political impact". Ideally, with separate websites or even separate brand names.

That is exactly what Amir is doing - his conference is not "The Bitcoin Conference", it's "unSYSTEM" (which I think is a great name) and it says on the front "unSYSTEM is the biggest event in the world covering Bitcoin and social change". So that's very clear - it's a group of people that is not "all Bitcoin users" or "all Bitcoin developers" that wants to talk about Bitcoin and social change.

Distance matters. Do we want a page on bitcoin.org promoting the Silk Road? No. Do we even want a direct link to the Silk Road? Probably not. Is it OK to have link to a news article that talks about the Silk Road and Bitcoin? Probably that's OK. A link has much less power than actual content, it's just a "hey, this might interest you, check it out". In that regard what Amir is doing is exactly right and what I've been hoping for.

[genjix]

I see what you're saying, but at the same time we have to be careful not to totally discard the political focus of Bitcoin. We fail to separate ourselves from anything before us without it. Satoshi included this stuff in his whitepaper and it's a big part of Bitcoin and its community.

I understand that your average consumer feels something strange over this stuff, but we also need to speak to those passionate people that will build Bitcoin up. People who will quit their jobs to build the movement because they believe in it. Revolution is not made by zombies. I don't mind there's a corporate conference, but not including the culture and social aspects also loses people who overlook Bitcoin as another scam money company.

I did this a few days ago: https://vimeo.com/64913466

Afterwards a Financial Times reporter came up to me and said they've been writing about Bitcoin lots, but they simply never realised there was an ideology side to Bitcoin and that it's so big. He told me they didn't realise the scope of Bitcoin. That's why it's important to have the fire and passion in Bitcoin. We can't all be the fake people in corporate Apple promos.

[ghost1542]

I was the first to have concerns about this, but Mike position seems reasonnable to me. I think however that it's too soon to add the banner (the event is in half a year). The banner is very visible on each pages and it's only relevant to use it temporarily when there's something of imminent interest IMO. So perhaps one month or two before the event. I don't want the website to be bloated. However, I also think that an "Event" page would be good.

There is a factual distinction between technology and ideology. So it's relevant to me to seperate both. This is the best way to allow both to have a wide audience, and to gather a lot of people based on their respective interest. Just like Linux is both a technology for businesses and consumers, and a battle horse of the open-source ideology. People will always be interested in Bitcoin for a wide range of different reasons.

[jaromil]

Totally for the event page, yes please! can also contribute some php code for it if you like, that we used at dyne.org.

About the distinction between science and humanities (to call political stances "ideologies" is reductive and offensive) I recommend having a debate on that. This book is a good start at it http://books.google.nl/books?id=TzQAPY8-S7UC showing there cannot be any scientific discovery (or technical creation, I'd argue) that has no influence on politics - to make it brief. I'll stop here, since this is kind of OT, but really this is a good read for those interested to debate.

[luke-jr]

@genjix There is no political focus of Bitcoin - certainly not what Occupy or Anonymous represent. Your story about the Financial Times reporter is exactly part of the problem: they now have the impression that these political movements are part of Bitcoin somehow, which they are not. Sensible, law-abiding citizens are not "zombies" or "fake people": We are real people whom also need to adopt Bitcoin in order for its success.

@mikehearn "unSYSTEM" seems to be a subtitle for the conference, like "The Future of Payments" is for the San Jose conference. Perhaps I'm reading into it too much, but it seems to have the basic meaning (including the apt-get line) of "upgrade the government by UNdoing it". Now, I'm not going to suggest they need to change the subtitle of their conference or anything, but at the very least it seems reasonable to clean up the implicit reference to Anonymous.

@jaromil Bitcoin will no doubt, as with any technology, influence politics in some way or another. The important difference here is that between the natural influence it produces compared to the forced influence of a political movement trying to "bundle" their ideas as a kind of part of the technology itself.

[mikehearn]

Let's shelve the philosophy, plenty of other places to discuss that. How about we revisit this in July? Then the May conference will be over and we can just replace the existing banner rather than have two, or introduce a news/events section (maybe on the front page).

[luke-jr]

That sounds like a good idea.

[ghost1542]

Yes, and I would like to improve the current translation process before going too much with pages that require some special steps regarding translations (press / news / version-history / events and such). I've not taken enough time to figure out the best way to handle everything correctly with jekyll. And perhaps that some cleanup / change in the menu before adding "Events" would be good. Having 2-3 latest news / events in the front page can be done and would be great IMO.

So let's revisit this in July.

[ghost1542]

Oops, better keep it open to have it on my radar, sorry

[wilderko]

ACK, bitcoin conferences are inevitable part of the bitcoin meme

[ghost1542]

An events page has been pushed and unSYSTEM is now linked on it from bitcoin.org .
http://bitcoin.org/en/events

Future conferences are welcome on that page also as long as there is a website we can link to.

If you still want to have a banner on bitcoin.org, please re-open this issue 2 months before the event. Just like what has been done for the Foundation conference, I think that if we choose to give such special visibility in the future, it should only be reserved for near-coming important events ( happening the next month ).

And actually, maybe that it will be better to just keep all events at the same level of visibility on the Events page in the future to keep it fair for every conference organizers. But as I said, if you want to ask, just ask 2 months before the event and we'll have far enough time to figure this out.