WTF is MetaFest
MetaFest IRL is the third MetaFest, finally happening IRL!
For the unfamiliar, there were 2 taglines used for MetaFest: “a bit of a conference, a bit of a hackathon & a shitload of fun.” & “MetaFest: Manifest the future”
MetaFest is a gathering for the people interested in DAOs & ReFi mainly, tho any Web3, meta & self-improvement topic goes.
Organizing more of a festival than a conference came from realizing most of us go to conferences not to listen to talks but to hang out with internet frens, meet new people & have fun while strenghtening connections & building new ones.
We are dropping the hackathon part unless we do it in collaboration with ETHGlobal or whoever might want to do it. We’d love to make ETHPula happen but organizing the festival & side-activities will be plenty enough of work.
Program, roughly:
- 4 days of warm-up events & activities. Meetups & dinners but mixed in with a lot more active stuff
- (for 300 attendees) 3 days of the main event. The usual: talks, panels, workshops & parties
- (limited to 50) 7 more days of a bus adventure with 50 DAOists down the coast of Croatia to Dubrovnik
Location
The main venue for MetaFest is this epic 200 years old Austro-Hungarian fortress near the city of Pula. The area of Pula has been inhabited by cavemen dating to almost 2k BC & some of great architecture eg. the great Roman amphitheater dates back to 27 years BC.
The city was an important port for the Roman empire & the main port of the Austro-Hungarian empire before its collapse almost 200 years ago.
Also Croatia as a whole is pretty damn beautiful.
Stuff to do
Instead of shilling Pula & Croatia, let me pull it back to MetaFest & what we plan on putting on!
The idea is that it would start with 3-4 days of people flying in, getting over their jet lag & start getting to know each other.
There are all kinds of activities available, anything from paintball & airsoft, to jet skiing, wakeboarding, adrenaline parks, water parks & what not. DAO vs DAO basketball, anyone?
Besides sightseeing, dinners, maybe going to the local national park islands etc ofc.
Then 3 days of workshops on anything from DAO funding to walking the tightrope (yes, literally), yoga & meditation over the day, talks in the afternoon/evening on anything from DAOs & ReFi to self-improvement & ironically, parties in the evening, with artists from the local scene as well as the DAO space.
For whom this isn’t enough: there will be a 50 person bus driving down the coast of Croatia to Dubrovnik, visiting beautiful places like Plitvice waterfalls, sleeping & possibly doing meetups in other bigger cities on the way down.
Why now?
We’ve done a virtual conference, a virtual hackathon & 2 MetaFests all in the virtual world. For those who don’t remember, I’ve been wanting to do something like this out here since before covid - so I think its about damn time. 
The crypto & especially DAO presence in the balkans is weak. Local talent generally works for outside companies etc. Unfortunately, a lot of people in Near, Polkadot & Cardano - time to change that.
Good tax laws (no tax for those who hodl 2+ years), functional (yet corrupt) states & infrastructure, high safety, good education & low standards of living as well as great timezone compatibility with the west make the balkans a great place to hire from & a great place to nomad around as well as a great place for financial transparency & governance technology adoption.
Who is it for?
Attendees would be mostly people from the DAO ecosystem & mainly focused on the Meta ecosystem. I will attempt to raise only from the DAOs in our close vicinity & will completely avoid any sponsors that aren’t value-aligned. I’m also friends with the professor on the local informatics university (which also has a blockchain course), so we’ll probably bring in a bunch of students as well.
Aiming for a total of about 300 people. Mostly DAO natives but also some crypto people from the balkans & students from the local universities.
Wen & wher?
August 16th-18th 2023 in Pula, Croatia
Interested?
So far, we created the legal entity, set the date with the venue owners, designed the website & invited a bunch of people. The website is being built and will soon be followed up by the announcement & a big push shilling it.
We need:
- More people who are interested in attending, running workshops etc.
- More people to help find sponsors & more projects to sponsor
- More people shilling the event in general