It is 27 August. Three weeks from today the first of us land in Barcelona for HiveFest XI, the Swarm edition, 17 to 20 September. Self-organized, community-run, no single organizer holding the pen. Which raises the obvious question: if nobody is handing down a schedule, where does the program come from?
From you. This year is about participation instead of just consuming.
So here is the thing "I" have been building.
The program tool: an unconference, fully on Hive
hivefe.st/program.html is the official planning tool for the In-Person BCN Swarm weekend, and it is decentralized by design. There is no database, no backend, no login I control. It runs entirely on Hive's own storage: every proposal is a Hive article or comment, every RSVP and every vote is a signed action under a track's anchor post, all carrying a bit of custom metadata so the page can read the program straight back off the chain.
You sign in with your own account, three ways: Hive Keychain (desktop extension), the Keychain mobile app via HiveAuth (for iOS and Android browsers - debugging somewhat...), or HiveSigner. Your keys never touch the site. When you propose something or RSVP, the tool broadcasts a comment under the right anchor post, signed by you, public, and editable later. A ♥ is your vote. That is the whole machine, and it is the same machine Hive already is.
What you can do in it right now: Please do it:
- RSVP per day and per part, so we get real headcounts instead of guesses.
- Propose a talk for the main day.
- Host a workshop or roundtable and put it on the board.
- Pitch a Barcelona exploration, a tour, a trip, a walk, whatever you want to share.
- ♥ the things you like, which is how the good ideas rise and how a schedule builds itself.
One house rule that makes it all work: when you propose your talk, workshop or activity, through the program tool it would be great to also write it up in your own Hive blog post and link back to hivefe.st/program.html. Tell people why they should join you, then point them at the programtool so they can RSVP and vote. Your post is the pitch, the tool is the room.
Where each day stands, and what it needs from you
Thursday 17, opening drinks. Wide open, and it needs a leader. Who takes this one? Scout a bar, somewhere we can spill into and actually hear each other, drop it into the tool and let the hearts pick the winner. Do a little research, propose a spot, and you are the person who kicked off the weekend.
Friday 18, the main conference day. I have a reservation at Akasha Hub for this. It costs money, I am fronting the booking, and I hope we can recoup it together and transparently over the weekend. This is the day to get our heads together and push Hive forward. Send in your talks through the program tool and we will shape the schedule together from what comes in. And if someone is up for livestreaming the whole day, that would be great, claim it.
Saturday 19, morning. After breakfast there is open space for the deeper stuff: in-depth discussions, workshops, roundtables, the sessions that need a bit of room to breathe. Propose yours and gather your people.
Saturday 19 afternoon and Sunday 20, daytime. This is Barcelona, so let's use it. Come up with your tourist plans and find friends to join: Sagrada Familia and Gaudi wanders, the beach, a cava day out to the Codorniu caves, whatever pulls you. Post it, link it, find your crew. The 20th also carries the closing dinner and closing drinks, so we send the weekend off properly, but let's see how that goes along the event itself.
For the techies: how it actually works
No backend, no database, no server I run. The whole tool is a thin static page sitting on top of Hive itself.
- The storage account is @hivefest.bcn26. It holds six anchor posts, one per part of the weekend: welcome drinks, talks, workshops, and the Barcelona visits. Everything you do in the tool becomes a Hive comment under the matching anchor post, authored by your own account and carrying a little custom metadata so the page can tell a proposal from an RSVP from ordinary chatter.
- Two Hive layers, that is it. Writes are plain
commentoperations broadcast to the base chain. Reads are a singlebridge.get_discussioncall per anchor against Hivemind, with node failover, so the program you see is assembled straight off the chain on page load. RSVPs and joins reuse deterministic permlinks, which on Hive is simply an edit, so toggling your attendance rewrites the same object instead of littering the chain with new ones. - The ♥ is a real Hive vote. Interest is measured in actual on-chain votes on the proposal comment, nothing invented on the side.
- Three ways to sign in, and your keys never touch the site: Hive Keychain (desktop browser extension), the Keychain mobile app via HiveAuth (for phone browsers), or HiveSigner (confirm each action). Signing happens in your wallet, the page only ever receives the signed result.
- Even moderation is on-chain. Scheduling and hiding are status replies from a small set of organiser accounts, so the curation is as auditable as everything else. And a normal comment under an anchor post stays a normal comment: only the ones carrying the tool's metadata surface as program items, so you can still just talk under the posts like any Hive thread.
Static page, self-hosted assets, strict CSP, all user content escaped. If it is in the program, it is on Hive, signed by whoever put it there.
Your move - are you coming in-person to BCN? RSVP!
Open hivefe.st/program.html, connect your account, and do one thing: RSVP for a day, propose a session, or heart an idea you want to see happen. Then write your blog post and link it back.
Nobody is going to fill this in for you, and that is the whole point. Three weeks. Let's build it together.
