Regen Village Brussels 2024

During EthCC in Brussels in August 2024, we created a village for all the regens coming to town.

It was an island of sanity outside of the main crowd, a place to regenerate, meet fellow regens and learn about regeneration, public goods and the commons. It was a living room for regens.

The Regen Village took place in a brand new community space, the Commons Hub Brussels. With our presence we contributed to launching a new permanent place, and we built a beautiful bridge between physical spaces and web3. This is not only an important seed planted for the community, but also for the city of Brussels, who sponsored the event and visited the conference.

Everybody left very inspired. It was not just another side event. It was something different that touched everyone who came by.

We offered CELO a free sponsorship and free use of the space in front of the Commons Hub for their waffle and flowers (+ electricity)

In numbers

604 wristbands activated
305 POAPs claimed
1,383 transactions
7,823 $RegenBXL tokens issued
161 participants have received more than 10 tokens
11 participants have received more than 100 tokens

Financial situation

This was a community initiative, bottom up. No main sponsor to put down $50k/day.

We ended up raising about ~€62k in total (our goal was to raise at least €100k for the full week to cover all costs and team).

As a result, we are unable to pay the people that worked so much to make this happen:

Leen: 4 FTE (main organizer, set up the space, volunteers management, logistics, catering, partnerships, programming, accounting, ...)
Guil: 2 FTE (set up the space, swags, video editing, design roll ups, live dashboard, POAP dispenser NFT wristbands)
Cori: 2 FTE (partnerships, comm)
Xavier: 2 FTE (set up the space, regen economy, develop the live dashboard, POAP dispenser NFT wristbands, accounting, …)

Total: 10 FTE (€50k-€80k considering €5k-€8k/FTE for core contributors before taxes)

Also worth mentioning Justin Holmes and his band came to play one evening. We passed the (crypto) hat and we sadly only raised... €18 for them (you can still donate to cryptograss.eth to support their band).

Income

Sponsors (€46,765)

Superchain (1 day set up + 1 day event): €10k (paid by Kolektivo)
BlastUp €5,995 (day 2 football game evening)
Metagov €5,000 (day 2 & 3)
Stellar Foundation €2,480 (day 2 & 3)
Golem (Octant) €5,000 (day 2 & 3)
Gnosis €5,000 (day 3)
Kevin Owocki €5,000 (day 4, book launch)
City of Brussels €3,000
Plural €2,512 (day 4)
Proof of Vibes €2,288 (day 5, Friday event)
Glodollar €490

Other revenue (€14,778)

Ticket sales on lu.ma: €6,568 (137 tickets)
Regens Unite Giveth: €5,060 (94 unique donors)
RegenToken Giveth: €2,650 (54 unique donors)
Mangrove DAO €500 (booking one meeting room for workshop)

(all numbers from the Giveth Givearth campaign here)

Total: €61,543

Expenses (€45,194)

View all expenses on our open collective: opencollective.com/regen-village/expens…

Core team

Leen: 4 FTE (main organizer, set up the space, volunteers management, logistics, catering, partnerships, programming, accounting, ...)
Guil: 2 FTE (set up the space, swags, video editing, design roll ups, live dashboard, POAP dispenser NFT wristbands)
Cori: 2 FTE (partnerships, comm)
Xavier: 2 FTE (set up the space, regen economy, develop the live dashboard, POAP dispenser NFT wristbands, accounting, …)

Total: 10 FTE (€50k-€80k considering €5k-€8k/FTE for core contributors before taxes)

That leaves us with a loss of €33,651 (at the lower end of the cost for the team, or €63,651 if we were to give them a proper paycheck).

Conclusion

It was a beautiful experience and we would do it again in a heartbeat. But to be honest, we don’t think that this is sustainable, yet alone regenerative.

If we want to see more of this happening, we ought to allocate more funding to this type of event. We hope that through the use of Gitcoin and other retroactive funding mechanisms, we can change the incentives and we can invest more, as a community, towards regenerative events and investing in creating new commons wherever we land as a community.