Yesterday I hosted the first tech meetup at my hometown Rhodes, Greece!
I have been attending various tech meetups in Athens, and have also seen cryptocurrencies meetups spread in regional cities also. But nothing at Rhodes, one of the biggest tourist destinations and among the richest areas in the country. Rhodes is the place I grew up in and spend ~25% of my time... So I said to myself: "if not me, who?"
So I took initiative to book a nice cafe, created a meetup.com and Facebook event and invited people. To my surprise, it drew a lot of attention, people shared and texted me about it! Cryptos are a HOT topic everywhere! I also made a logo and a poster, here's the poster:
About the meetup:
14 people showed up (including the cutie in the left). You can notice wide variety of age groups represented, which was amazing and helped develop a very interesting coversation. In the beggining we took some time to introduce oursevles and see our overall knowledge of the crypto world. I teased them with the following slide:
Most of the attendants knew less than 3 of the terms above, while only one knew all of them except Cryptokitties!
That's what I was expecting actually, so the conversation covered the very basic topics of cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, peer-to-peer and Blockchain.
The meetup held for almost 3 hours and everyone was super engaged in it. Lots of questions were asked about all topics, and we actually covered briefly almost all of the terms in the slide above.
It was interesting to hear the thoughts of older people, like a retired banker, a veteran engineer, some doctors and a private school owner. The younger ones had vastly different views, trusting technology much more than goverments and being more open to new stuff.
The last topic of the discussion was how can this new economy benefit our local society and businesses.
Being a tourist destination, Rhodes can benefit in many ways like:
- Attract new visitors by advertising crypto-friendly businesses. These visitors are actually high-quality tourists also, being well-paid or having made a lot of money through investing early
- Host tech conferences
- Help small businesses work around liquidity and capital control issues
- Bring digital nomads. Most developers in the blockchain world work remotely, only needing a fast connection. So why not live in a Greek island paradise?
- Youth digital employment. Unemployment is huge here in Greece! Why not help youth develop blockchain dev skills so that they get a great job?
Last but not least! We all agreed to meet again next month! In the next meetup we will get everyone to setup a wallet and move funds around.
Finally, many thanks to the @Agorise community and @kenCode for giving me the push to get this started!