Oddbean

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the organization and success of #nostrasia and for making nostr.world possible. The immense effort involved in orchestrating such an event is commendable, and I'm thankful for having had the chance to participate. A key expectation for me was to delve deeper into and connect with the Japanese Nostr community. Unfortunately, despite being in the same vicinity, a sense of connection was missing. The language barrier and cultural differences seemed to be significant obstacles. I struggled to follow the Japanese talks and couldn't engage with the Japanese attendees as I had envisioned. This highlighted the need for more inclusive and accessible communication strategies in future gatherings. While much about the event was praiseworthy, there are aspects I wish were different. The format, dominated by numerous stage presentations and hallway interactions, was commendable, yet I believe an ideal unconference strikes a balance between these formats. The structure of having many speakers and an audience primarily in a listening role hindered the potential for deeper, personal connections. As a speaker on the first day, I was approached for conversations about Nostr, which were enriching, but somewhat sporadic and unstructured. This dynamic, where a few are seen as heroes imparting wisdom to an audience, doesn’t quite resonate with the collaborative and egalitarian ethos of the Nostr community. We avoided the pitfalls of corporate booths and sales pitches, but there’s still potential to enhance our approach. For future events, I propose reducing the number of talks and panels. An alternative could be pre-recording talks for online viewing, allowing us to utilize in-person time for more meaningful, facilitated networking. Open Spaces and similar models offer guidance on this, involving active facilitators and opportunities for attendees to propose discussion topics and participate in smaller, focused group conversations. This format emphasizes personal connections over mere information sharing, utilizing various room sizes for more inclusive and effective discussions. This isn't to diminish the achievements of the Nostr.world team or the value of Nostrica and Nostrasia. Both events were extraordinary, offering immense learning opportunities and a platform for networking. Yet, there's always room for improvement, particularly in fostering more inclusive and impactful interactions. Aspiration Tech’s guide on creating participatory events is a valuable resource in this regard: Aspiration Tech's Participatory Event Guide https://aspirationtech.org/papers/creating_participatory_events The goal is to enhance the value of our gatherings by deepening the connections within our diverse community.

What I noticed is the spirit of collaboration. Seeing the people you know from online and noticing they are the same in real life is refreshing 🫂💜 I think this is the biggest power. To colloberate, earn together some sats (because earning is important, we still can’t pay with kisses at the grocery store, we always say in the Netherlands) But this feeling we want to really help/ build together is the power from Nostr on this moment. I am happy I could work with Nostr.build, @The Fishcake🐶🐾 @nandan (who I met at the unconference gonna help me sharing my art in Mumbai) @yutaro who I just met in Bangkok, working together on a japanese webshop. @Jakk Goodday introducing me to the amazing Thai Nostr community and I am now gonna help @suntoshi with Badgestr. This spirit feels like when I met older entrepreneurs in my early days starting my own business who were helping me. Now I understand why they did it, we just see ourself in this energy of wanna create things. We are all one 🫂💜 Stay humble and enjoy life.

+1 This was my first event of any kind and I’m surprised how well it went on just with volunteer organization. At the same time, I felt we didn’t really connect with the Japanese community nor made enough effort to get more Japanese people at the venue. This is not to put a blame on anyone at all - you all did amazing work! I found the 1-1 conversations and group chats to be most valuable despite some great talks as well. Would have been cool to focus on specific topics and have group discussions of some sort to kick around ideas to overcome various challenges. Overall fantastic event!

Thank you, @rabble , for the insights into your #Nostrasia experience. Turning passive listeners into active participants at unconferences may be an answer to shaping more interesting in-depth discussions, helping bridge cultural gaps, and some #unmarketing consumer research. Many builders in the nostr community choose to protect people by not gathering data, nor selling it off to advertisers. This shapes a caring community working on improving their products for the people who use them, instead of for advertisers. We are likely to see many benefits to that choice, including a focus on building creative tools empowering the individual. Not gathering data creates a need to think of alternative avenues on what can improve our experience of nostr products and services, what is drawing people in, and what keeps us in nostr. #Nostr may exist in cyberspace, and many people offer product and service improvement ideas and suggestions within nostr... but when we get to share both space and time, like in conferences, there is no telling what idea may sprout from bringing people who care about similar principles and open protocols. If we can go a step further, not only bringing people together, but bringing them together as active participants, not just silent listeners, the overall conference experience is likely to be much more engaging and enriching. As nostr breaks away from the traditional ways of platforms and their traditional marketing channels, why shouldn't conferences too? Open Space methodologies and Aspiration Tech guidelines have many practical ideas and examples. They help blur the lines between the traditional "speaker" and "listener" roles, creating interactive atmospheres to learn from one another. For example, ahead of the event, participants work on shaping a specific, yet flexible list of topics. This looks similar to what @ROCKSTAR will be guiding, ahead of the next nostr.world unconference, through GitHub projects. You will be able to suggest topics in the open. Then, at the start of a conference, participants gather in small groups, for a few minutes, to each jot down questions on their topics of interest (in post-its). Each question is read out loud and gets assigned a time slot in its specific session at the conference. If too many questions are received, similar ones can be grouped and questions can be prioritized. As a leader in your topic area, you get to learn what people care about, their pain points, their ideas and suggestions... and share your knowledge with them in unconference-style sessions. Having these kinds of "unconference-style" sessions is something that may seem new and not everyone may want to adopt. But, for everyone who wants to try, could we have labels for "conference-style" and "unconference-style” in the GitHub projects area, once it is ready, so speakers can choose whether they want to try something different? @ROCKSTAR

I think also the synergy between both fields will make a lot happen. (I already experience this here) As a creative you have ideas but only programmers can make it work. But they need design/UI. We both need each other to create. ☯️ But its all about this positive energy what is going on. The most valuable thing we have in life is time and you just want to share it with amazing people. 🙏 Have a lovely day💜🫂