WRC opening day in Greece.
With Fall upon us, it is time to prepare for our final quarter of 2024. Q4 spans October, November and December and while a series of ongoing promotional activities are planned, this is the time we work on our end of year reviews and plan ahead.
Please keep an eye out for some exciting new engagement opportunities and announcements, including the upcoming launch of the public VP website and portal!
The Value Plan event contribution team of Hive volunteers is at well over 200 people who do everything from organizing events to mentoring during hackathons to interacting with the public at conference booths. Out of these, the project managers are @lordbutterfly, @guiltyparties and @crimsonclad. As before, your Value Plan keyholders remain @theycallmedan, @smooth, @guiltyparties, @crimsonclad and @blocktrades.
In this proposal we are seeking to complete the annual budget with 200,000 HBD, which will also as we intend, will eliminate the need for a Q1 2025 Bridge.
Upcoming Major Events
Major events for Hive are either large conferences or similarly large-scale initiatives expecting multiple tiers of exposure.
TechEx Conference - Amsterdam - October 1-2
Once again the focal point of our participation at this massive event will be a Hive Networking space and a presentation by @McSamm with the help of @Collinz in respect to the Community Well Project and the related digital innovation introduced through Hive in Ghana. We have a small contingency of local Hive community members who will attend and support the promotional aspects of this engagement. This conference has been pre-scheduled for nearly a year and is part of a two-event participation package.
Website: https://www.digitaltransformation-week.com/europe/ (please note that it is still being updated at this time)
Last year's display.
Those who would like to attend and need tickets: please let us know in the comments below. We will need a way to contact you off-chain for logistical coordination purposes.
Central European Rally - October 17-20
To finish off our year of promotion in racing, Hive will be once again be participating in the CER. The CER takes places in three different countries in Europe: Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic.
While we do not receive community tickets, those who are interested in attending should please let us know in comments below.
Next year's schedule remains undetermined and we will hold a community discussion to ensure we can capitalize on every selected location and the promotional opportunities see more interaction (after WRC announces the rallies, of course, as there are some changes year to year).
Explanation of Value Plan
A lot of people have misunderstood what VP is and what it is not and for this reason a new explanation is in order. We hope this explanation answers your questions but if it does not, please include them in your comments.
VP is not an Incubator or Accelerator
Incubators and Accelerators take startups and new projects and fund, mentor and support them until the project is able to support itself. They rely on investor funds, grants and similar sources of funding. They serve startup businesses and projects that people have initiated and that need a helping hand. The needs are determined by the people who apply to their services. The startups and projects get funding and are responsible to use it but are not monitored. Leftover funds aka funding gained by these startups and projects through the program is profit and may be rolled into the business or used however the owners would like.
The normal Decentralize Hive Fund (DHF) is a version of an Incubator/Accelerator model. Its purpose is to fund improvements to Hive. It lacks a set scope as each proposal is evaluated separately by community members. Proposal owners submit their requirements for either on-going expenses, project-based expenses or backpay. The DHF allows for infrastructure costs, salaries, curation, social impact without promotion, development, and whatever it is that may be proposed and approved. Proposal owners may pay themselves and others and may collect any profits their venture makes.
VP is a scope-based promotional budget where it decides what activities will be carried out and where. The project is normally selected before the organizer is - a conference doesn't have its Hive staff until it's decided that we will attend. The person who brings up the idea may not be the person who attends it. The only change to this is with projects that require niche expertise, such as sports or social impact-related. If funds are left over, they may be put into subsequent activities (carried over) if the same organizer is in charge of multiple deliverables with the same project or refunded back to the main budget. No funds may be used for salaries and no profits of any kind may be retained.
With Hive-initiated events, VP decides what events are held and where they are held. It aims to crowd-source recommendations and people have regularly reached out through various chats or here in comments (a clearer system is being developed at this time). If an event location is not viable for external reasons, we discontinue a planned activity or not carry it out in the first place. We always look for new opportunities globally while still maintaining our position in locations where we have a strong foothold.
In summary:
| Incubator | DHF | VP |
|---|---|---|
| for startups | for anything that benefits Hive | only for Hive promotion |
| lump sum funds | funds over time | funds as necessary |
| admin support in form of mentorship | only community feedback | ongoing project management and community feedback |
| can keep profits | can keep profits | cannot keep profits |
| can pay salaries | can pay salaries | cannot pay salaries |
| paid staff and investors | both paid staff and volunteers | only volunteers |
| monetary incentives for participation | intristic incentives and monetary incentives | only intristic incentives |
VP is only about Hive promotion
It is a misconception that VP is designed to make people's lives better in various locations. While its excellent that we can do this while promoting Hive, this is not its purpose. Any social impact activities or activities where a social impact is possible are used for promotional purposes.
These promotional purposes (of the social impact projects) are not onboarding the local demographic to Hive. There are many issues with that: one, we often face barriers in literacy and two, it is a balance of ethics. It is highly unethical to come to people who are suffering and promise them a solution that we cannot control, such as that they will earn a living wage by posting on Hive. We do not do such things. What we do is explain what Hive is and let the individuals who are interested and feel they are suitable make a decision.
So how do the social impact projects promote? In the immediate term, they lead to localized media coverage, which we desperately need. In the long term, they allow us to showcase that Hive has the ability to change the world through decentralization. We are seeing everyone from the representatives of large humanitarian organizations to conference organizers reach out to us. Unfortunately, this type of promotion is a slow burn and discussions on partnerships and opportunities for Hive can span well over a year.
When it comes to sports, people tend to believe that VP is about sponsoring athletes. This is not the case. VP evaluates existing opportunities to showcase Hive at sporting events and activities and covers the cost of participation. It cannot support athletes during their day to day training and existence as athletes. For events where VP is the organizer, the event is placed in a location with a predetermined audience size and quality.
What do we mean when we speak of quality of the audience? We recognize that Hive is not the right solution for everyone. It is best for individuals who are already financially stable, literate, have an interest in technology, have a business perhaps, and are able to positively contribute to the ecosystem. Students who love technology are a focal point at a segment of events. With the definition of quality we must also include the numbers of the audience. Any non-targeted public activity must be seen by as large of a crowd as possible and we typically aim for 500+.
At conferences, VP is focused on finding the best and most affordable opportunities. We have seen a very unfavorable market across all domains and this has affected every conference out there, be it crypto-focused or not. Attendance is down and more students are flocking to conferences than ever with the goal of securing a job. It is the job of the owners of the conference to fill their event with a wide range of people such as of course the students but also business professionals, investors, founders of various types and so on. If we have attended a conference in the past and saw partially-empty auditoriums, we will not renew our attendance. If we found a conference filled with only job-seekers, we will not renew. However, if a conference has gone above and beyond for us while being professionally organized with many great participants and visitors invited, we are grateful and happy with the relationship.
Overall and in summary, there is some confusion of how projects start. While VP project ideas are introduced by community members, the actual projects start as VP projects -- they do not exist as projects or entities prior to this. These are not projects that were already created by someone and were then 'sponsored' by VP. VP does not sponsor anything. Further, any attempt to introduce a personal for-profit project to VP under the misconception that it an Incubator/Accelerator, is blocked. One cannot start a project and hope that it will be 'picked up' by VP. This is a common point of misunderstanding.
With village elders and MissBitcoin during the launch of the latest Hive well in Ghana.
VP management and projections
The development of VP's Hive promotions are recommended by its project managers, by partners and event organizers, or by community members new to VP. It welcomes ideas for promotional initiatives. These are typically shared in a variety of ways including in comments of VP posts, directly to the project managers and organizers, or on chat platforms.
The preparation, legality, processes, approaches and event styles are all based on the country in which an event or activity is held. We know that different cultures prefer different types of venues, their norm is their own local food, their graphics have a certain look and feel to them, and they have special customs we need to be aware of. This is why all of our project teams have locals Hive community members among them, even if the organizer is not local (some areas simply don't have enough available community members).
When we started Hive promotional activities, even pre-VP, we didn't know what to expect as no mainstream experience could prepare any of us for the realities of advertising a decentralized blockchain and crypto without any central team or organization. Small things that we used to take for granted, such as having a mailing address, were no longer within the realm of possibility. This made simple tasks far more complex than they normally would be. We faced barriers at every turn: no founder, no doxxed team, no credit card, not even a phone number.
Now we know what works, what struggles and what simply fails. We can project of a conference potential for success simply by looking at its pitch deck. We no longer accept partnerships with no concrete plans for integration or utility. We know how much merchandise is supposed to cost in any specific country and what type of thing to give out where. When we evaluate whether an activity can meet its targets and showcase Hive we are using our knowledge built on past events and market research.
Some of you may have noticed that over the summer we have pivoted towards digital promotions vs physical ones. We have also focused more on what we refer to as "B2B", which is technically "business to blockchain" aka the use of HBD in sales transactions. VP is designed in such a way as to naturally change direction as necessary in order to respond to market shifts and emerging opportunities.
We are also approaching a maturity that allows for a comprehensive review. The general plan for the last quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025 is to focus on reviewing our approaches and successes. We are in the process of thoroughly reassessing our strategy concerning several ongoing projects, with the aim of optimizing our approach. As part of this re-evaluation, we are actively exploring new opportunities that may add significant value to our operations, ensuring that we capitalize on them better in the future.
Proposal
This proposal is for 200,000 HBD which is slotted not only for Q4 but also will, as we intend to close off the year and pre-plan for 2025 deliverables earlier, will eliminate the need for a Q1 2025 Bridge.