The annual Ethereum (ETH) DevCon for this year will be held in Prague, Czech Republic, from the 30th of October till the 2nd of November. The conference is where Ethereum based designers, developers, researchers and artists meet. It is a family reunion hosted by the Ethereum Foundation to further educate and empower the Ethereum community to build more and better decentralized applications.

Increased Community Participation at this Year’s DevCon

Back in late July, the Ethereum Foundation introduced a more participatory and all-inclusive program for the event this year. Ethereum community members were allowed to apply to participate in the following activities during the event:

Give a presentation : Participants to give a 5-minute lightning talk or a 20-minute presentation on the topic of their choice

: Participants to give a 5-minute lightning talk or a 20-minute presentation on the topic of their choice Lead a workshop : Participants could teach people to do something. Such an activity would be 2 hours long and participants should help their audience “get their hands dirty” by either writing code or learning to tell stories

: Participants could teach people to do something. Such an activity would be 2 hours long and participants should help their audience “get their hands dirty” by either writing code or learning to tell stories Host a breakout room: You could be creative and come up with your own programming for Devcon4. You could host dapp design critiques, facilitate a conversation, do live security reviews…just to name a few

Applications have since been closed to allow ample time for the Ethereum Foundation to organize the event appropriately.

Sponsors and Supporters

The Ethereum Foundation has since published a list of Sponsors for the event. The sponsors are further categorized into 6 tiers to provide support in significant and impactful ways. A few of the sponsors include: AdEx, Blockchain Asset Ventures, Blockfolio, ShapeShift, SingularDTV, Ernst & Young, Golem, Microsoft, Energy Web Foundation, just to name a few.

A new support tier of Scholarships and Grant supporters has been added to help bring new talent into the space. The grants and scholarships will provide support for academic programs for students on their way to becoming experienced developers.

Conclusion

This year’s Developer conference is particularly important for the Ethereum project and community, given the underlying issues of scaling the platform as well as coming to a consensus on the Constantinople upgrade.

What are your thoughts on the Ethereum Developer Conference? Are you attending the event? What are your expectations? Please let us know in the comment section below.