ATmosphereConf: Confirming Seattle, Organizers, & first sponsor

We're about 2 months away from ATmosphereConf, so it's time to provide some updates!

We're confirming two important things:

• We're going to be holding the event in Seattle, Washington
• The dates will be over the weekend of March 22nd and 23rd, 2025

The rest of this post are some high level introductions and planning we've done so far.

Volunteer Organizers

We are a small group of volunteer organizers.

• Ted Han @knowtheory.net is based in Oakland. Ted is a product leader focused on social software and data privacy, has previously led products at Mozilla, and advises IFTAS's decentralized trust & safety efforts.
• Erik Marks @rekmarks.com is based in Seattle, and is our on the ground person for the conference. He has a history of software security and protocol standardization.
• Josh Shaked @jshaked.com based in NYC and is an associate with Sentinel Global, a global venture firm that supports and invests in projects building on the open social web.
• Boris Mann @bmann.ca is based in Vancouver, Canada, and has been hosting AT Protocol Tech Talks. He has a long history of community building and protocol collaboration.

We will be making a call for additional volunteers, especially for day of support in Seattle. We're happy to accept support and in-kind sponsor offers as well. Anyone want to make us a logo / some designs???

Cheap and Cheerful Unconference

We had a lot of people fill out the call for interest, including over 30 out of 90 people saying they were interested in speaking.

At the same time, we are an all volunteer crew putting this together out of sponsorships and ticket sales, want to support people in attending, get great video of what is covered...and we've only got a couple of months!

So, you should prep yourself for a "cheap and cheerful" unconference. That means we'll have some invited / curated speakers (we'll announce early commitments next week), but we'll reserve the bulk of the time and space to connect, discuss, debate, and share ideas around the topics that attendees care about. We'll be working on an agenda that combines high quality presentations with unconference-style choose your topic, as well as time and space to hack on everything from collaboration to code.

We'd like to capture your great ideas and projects in the form of short lightning talks, and reserve budget for high quality video recordings to share with many more people around the world to see than will be attending in person.

This is the first ATmosphereConf: connecting across the worldwide blue skies to meet each other in person, many of us for the first time after multiple of years getting to know each other online. We'll meet, make plans, and form connections that will create strong ties to carry us through the rest of the year

Raft Foundation

We're signing up with the Raft Foundation as fiscal hosts for the conference. Raft is a new US-based 501c3 fiscal sponsor:

A raft is about survival and adventure, collaboration and flow. Amidst today's torrent of crises, it's easy to feel helpless. But we believe that if we work together, we can stay afloat, and even shape our collective destiny.We are guided by our founding principles:

Resilience: 'we will endure together and emerge stronger'
Autonomy: 'each by our own choice'
Fullness: 'toward dreams of abundance'
Transparency: 'with nothing to hide'

These founding principles and longer list of secondary values really spoke to us, and we thank Raft for supporting us. We look forward to collaborating with them and with other projects that host with them over time.

Behind the scenes, we've got a small ATmosphere Builders Collective looking at pooling funds and grants through this setup as well, with an initial proposal around geographic data + venues Lexicon and infrastructure.

First Sponsor: Peter Wang's Skyseed

Thank you to Peter Wang of Skyseed Fund for stepping up as the first sponsor for ATmosphereConf. Find out more about Skyseed in the TechCrunch launch announcement »

Our major projected expenses for conference operations are venue, food, and video. We need to support speakers with travel expenses, and would like to have bursaries for others to attend.

We're going to make the ticket prices as accessible as we can. If you've got a day job that can support your attendance, we'll have ways for you to pay a little more for your ticket, to supporting tickets and travel for others.

Please get in touch if you're interested in sponsoring. You'll get glory, follows, and thanks from AT Protocol developers, community, & builders.

Stay tuned!

OK! We're all excited to keep things moving and will have more announcements next week about speakers, get early bird tickets available.

Follow @atprotocol.dev for updates, subscribe to email updates on this site, and RSVP on Smoke Signal »