Authors: Joshua Bate (Bonfires), Yuting (Agora)
Resources Required: Communication support (QR placement and official listings), access to program data in machine-readable form, introductions to Community Hub organisers, Devcon tickets
Summary of Proposal
Simple Summary
An opt-in companion web app for Devcon 8 that helps attendees navigate the week, and turns the conference’s collective idea space into an open knowledge graph the ecosystem keeps afterwards.
50 word summary
A companion app with three surfaces: a Concierge agent that knows the whole event, Community Hub agents that help Hubs organise and share what happens inside them, and Hitchhikers, privacy-preserving tools for attendee field journalism. Built on Bonfires (shared context) and Agora (structured deliberation / opinion-mapping). Open-source, consent-first, published openly at close.
Abstract
Devcon produces more knowledge and more need than any attendee can navigate, and almost all of it evaporates when the event ends. The Guide is a companion web app — scan a QR, no install — that helps people find their way through the week and, with consent, turns what happens into shared knowledge the ecosystem keeps.
Three surfaces sit on one substrate. The Concierge answers questions about talks, side events, venues and the live state of the room from a knowledge graph that thickens as the week progresses. Community Hubs each run their own agent to help organise and facilitate their space, and to surface Hub activity to the wider event. Hitchhikers gives attendees privacy-preserving tools for on-the-ground field journalism, turning participants into contributors rather than consumers.
The technology is a Bonfire for the shared context — a live knowledge graph of people, sessions, topics, forums, projects and venues — and Agora for structured deliberation, integrated into the interface rather than bolted on beside it.
Everything is opt-in and open-source. Contributions are aggregated by default; attendees choose, at permission levels they control, whether to attach a profile and be discoverable. The resulting knowledge graph is published under a permissive licence at close.
Motivation & Rationale
Why now, at Devcon
Devcon is the irl home of the Ethereum development community. It is the most important event of the year for gathering the minds and ideas relating to the open, decentralised infrastructure we need to secure our collective futures. Given that, improving how we capture the context Devcon generates should be a high priority. If the conference’s collective idea space can be captured and structured correctly and ethically, it becomes a resource the whole community can use, long after the venue empties.
How this enhances the attendee experience
It has a memory. Every surface reads from and writes to the same knowledge graph. The concierge isn’t answering from a static program dump — it’s answering from a live structure that thickens as the week goes on. Trending topics, matchmaking, Hub activity and the conference graph are all views onto one substrate, not four separate features.
It makes the good accidents less accidental. The best conversations at Devcon happen by chance. The Guide’s discovery surfaces mix people and rooms in the same stream, so the same gesture that introduces you to a person can drop you into a conversation already running on the thing you came here to argue about.
It reduces the Hub coordination load. Community Hubs are the best thing about Devcon and among the hardest things to run. A Hub agent helps organisers plan and facilitate their space and pushes Hub activity outward, so a Hub stops being a room you have to already know about.
Why this is better than the non-blockchain alternative
Participation doesn’t require surveillance. A conventional event app buys personalisation with profiling. Structured deliberation via Agora supports privacy-preserving, sybil-resistant contribution: the default is aggregate, and discoverability is a graduated, user-controlled disclosure. Proof-of-attendance and ZK proofs give signal without tracking — the honest way to offer matchmaking.
What it produces belongs to the ecosystem. The maps, insights and knowledge graph are published openly under a permissive licence at close. The stack is open-source and self-hostable; storage and models are modular. There is no black box and no vendor lock on the record of what the ecosystem said. A closed SaaS event app cannot make that commitment.
Implementation
Current state
The companion app is built and can be demonstrated end to end on a phone today. What it does:
Concierge — ask it anything.
The concierge knows the whole event and answers in plain language, in whatever language you asked in. It’s the difference between “here is a 200-session schedule” and “the thing you’re looking for is in Hall 3 in twenty minutes, and the person who wrote the paper you’re citing is speaking after it.” When a question outgrows one person, it becomes a Forum — a room you can join, scoped to a topic, project or Hub.
Explore — find your way.
An interactive venue map where every room is tappable and tells you what’s happening in it. A side-event layer pulled from where side events actually live, rather than a list maintained by hand and abandoned on Tuesday. And the city itself — food, coffee, places to work — with attendees adding the good ones as they find them, so the guide is better on day four than day one.
Meet — find your people.
A discovery stream mixing people and rooms. Match with someone, or join the forum where six people are already deep in it. Tap an organisation name and you fall into the knowledge graph: who else is here from that org, what they’re working on, what sessions touch it. Attendees can propose their own forums for organiser review.
Live — see the room.
Devcon has a mood, and it moves. Trending shows what the event is thinking about right now, and separately what it’s been circling all afternoon — often a different thing entirely. A live ticker runs the pulse of the event past you. And the conference graph draws the whole event as what it is: connected.
Organiser tooling.
Everything above is administered live, during the event, by the people running it — approving what attendees propose, tuning side-event sourcing, placing the venue map, pinning what matters. One deliberate omission: organisers can pin or hide a trending item but cannot edit its score. A number an organiser types isn’t trending.
What remains to be built
We currently have most of the frontend and backend built for the Bonfires portion, as we are already serving clients with the same infrastructure. The remaining work is to prepare the features available to Devcon for open sourcing. This is a core part of our strategy. We are just not yet ready to open the repo, but we will be by October at latest.
Agora is fully deployed and open source.
Hitchhiker is the newest of the three surfaces and is specified rather than shipped, though it extends primitives already working — suggest a place, propose a forum, save a contact are each already small acts of adding to the collective record. Hitchhiker generalises this into a first-class mode: attendees as correspondents. Field capture from wherever you are; structured prompts via Agora, timed and contextual, rather than an empty text box; consent chosen per contribution; and everything feeding the same graph rather than a separate archive.
Between now and Mumbai the work is open source preparation and Hitchhiker build-out — not design discovery.
Prior implementation at other events
Bonfires V1 has been trialled in the wild at Edge City (Esmeralda), ETHBoulder, and the Cypherpunk Network. The Synthesis.md agentic hackathon ran automated judging across 680 submissions. Agora was piloted at a prior Devconnect under its own DIP, and the QR-placement model used there is the one proposed here.
On the event-production side, our team has spent two years running World of DeSci programming and Community Hub coordination at prior Devcons — we have run the Hub-organiser problem this proposal addresses, from inside it.
Feedback and data from attendees post-event
Yes. The published knowledge graph is itself the post-event artefact, and we would want to review with the Foundation what it shows before publication. We would also run a short post-event deliberation round via Agora on the Guide itself, and publish the findings alongside the graph.
Operational Requirements & Ownership
1. What actions are required to implement the proposal at Devcon?
-
Approval to run the Guide as an opt-in companion app at Devcon 8 India.
-
Program data made available in a machine-readable form, as early as possible.
-
Promotion through Devcon channels: QR placement and inclusion in official listings, on the model used for the Agora pilot. We note the constraint from that pilot that nothing may be affixed to venue walls, and would work within whatever structures the production team provides.
-
Introductions to Community Hub organisers for onboarding ahead of the event.
We are not requesting official app integration this edition, and we are not requesting payment from Devcon.
2. Who is responsible for implementation?
Bonfires owns the app, the knowledge graph infrastructure, and the Hub agent deployment. Agora owns the deliberation layer and the privacy-preserving contribution mechanics. Both teams commit to being on the ground and operational from Day 0, with Hub onboarding beginning before the event.
Bonfires V2 is the first open-source release of the platform. Any Devcon commitment here is contingent on that repository being publicly linkable, which is the correct order given this edition’s requirements.
3. What other projects could this be integrated with?
The Guide is designed to compose rather than compete:
-
Community Hub teams — the primary integration surface; each Hub’s agent is theirs to shape.
-
Side-event platforms (Luma, Social Layer) — already the sourcing layer for the side-event surface.
-
Proof-of-attendance and identity projects (e.g. zkPassport-style attestations) — for sybil-resistant contribution without identity disclosure.
-
Any DIP producing structured event data — schedule tooling, session recordings, note-taking activations — all of which can write into the shared graph rather than into a silo.
We would actively welcome co-authorship or integration from other DIP teams working adjacent to this.
Links & Additional Information
-
Bonfires — https://bonfires.ai
-
Agora Citizen Network — https://agoracitizen.network/
-
Prior Agora DIP: Piloting Agora during Devconnect — DIP: Piloting Agora during DevConnect
Open questions for the Devcon team
-
What’s the earliest the program data can be made available in a machine-readable form?
-
Would the Foundation want the published knowledge graph hosted under a Devcon or EF namespace, or independently under a permissive licence?
-
Is there appetite to co-design the Agora elicitation questions with the Foundation, so the broad listening serves the ecosystem’s actual open questions rather than ours?
-
How many Community Hubs would you expect, and is there an existing organiser channel where we could pilot the Hub agent ahead of the event?
Co-authored by Bonfires and Agora. Open-source, opt-in, and verifiable throughout.
