Cardano goes to Milan

We believe there is a great undeveloped potential to grow the Cardano Ecosystem in Italy, and we think Milan is the best place to get started with action, as it is the leading financial center in Italy, a prime location for multinational operations, and is easily reachable from Switzerland, France, and continental Europe.

In the short term, we aim to create a notable event: with high-quality talks and speakers, to attract over one hundred visitors from the best Enterprises, Startups, and Universities.

In the long term, our goal is to transform this event into an "Cardano Summit Italy". We believe that starting from Milan we can lower the barriers to the adoption of the Cardano Technology and increase its usage in Italy.

Out plan is to connect with Universities of Milan, where we already have some contact, and get their support in order to build an event with high participation of Students.

The Event, ideally, should take place in a warm season, in order to reduce the number of absences due to Covid Restrictions. The Event, should be held on a Friday or Saturday, in order to increase the chances of having an high number of people at the event.

== Proposed Timeline

After three months

The website should be active. Conference planning should be complete. We should get in touch with partners and additional sponsors. 
Also, we should have ready a website where we collect the call for papers, and a committee that checks the proposal for the talks

After 6 months

The committee should choose the best talks and publish the lineup for the conference. The marketing should be done both online and in paper-form at the nearest/biggest universities (e.g. Milan, Turin, Piacenza, Bologna, Firenze, Roma, etc..). Everybody in the Cardano ecosystem should know about the Conference. 

After 9 months => Expected Public Event

The conference should take place, ideally in the end of September/Beginning of October, a period where Students are returning to Milan for the beginning of the academic year, and a period where there are many people in the City.

After 1 Year

The conference website should contain all the Presentation related to the sessions held, including material related to hackathons. At this point we should be able to monitor the interest pre-conference and post-conference, by looking at the statistics of the event website. 

== Contacts and Location

Given a previous experience in organizing a Conference in Milan together with the University of Milano (https://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_Day_Milano_2017), we would like to follow a similar format and organize the event in collaboration with The University of Milan. 

== Impact

Milan is one of the biggest urban centers in Italy, located in one of the richest economic areas of Italy. If we are able to have relevant speakers, and we perform proper marketing, we should be able to reach a vast number of people interested in the Technology.

To maximize the impact, we should be able to provide content in double language, e.g. English and Italian, such that we don't discourage attendees who have a limited knowledge of the English language. The idea is to have at least a few sessions in Italian.

To maximize the impact, we should be able have an hackathon session, where the newjoiners could have 1-1 sessions with experts, such that they could be easily introduced into the Cardano Ecosystem. 

== Auditability

To call the conference a success, we should be able to attract around 100 visitors, including Students, Professors. 

Also, we should be able to call people not only from the Universities in Milan, but we should be able also to call students. 

Three months after the event, we should be able to monitor the engagement on the event using the event's website, twitter, Google Trends, and monitoring the Cardano's forum for mentions. 

== Relevant Experience

- Andrii : Expert in Marketing, organized Cardano events in Ukraine, visited Milan several times (one of the favorite cities!)
- Patrik (https://www.linkedin.com/in/psuzzi/): Already organized an Open Source event in Milan. See: https://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_Day_Milano_2017

== Costs Breakdown

The overall budget is estimated in 25.000 USD and it should be divided as follows

Assuming we have 100 attendees, 15 presenters, 5 organizers, 4 people for catering, 2 people for marketing, we would have - more or less - the following expenses: 

- 6000: marketing (both English and Italian), including website and ads.
- 10000: conference venue, including rooms, catering, wifi
- 7000: to incentivize presenters/organizers, contribute to travel expenses
- 2000: additional expenses, e.g. gadgets, t-shirts, giveaways, beers or aperitivo with a restricted group (aperitivo is expensive).

Cost details for the venue

Here is an idea about the costs of the conference venue in Milan (pre covid, see https://meeting-hub.net/blog/quanto-costa-una-sala-meeting)
- 2 meeting rooms with 100 people capacity: ~2500 USD
- 3 coffee breaks (x 120 people): ~2500 USD
- 1 light lunch (x120 people): ~3000 USD
- wifi and other utilities or services (x120 pp): ~2000 USD