VDP-62: Budget Allocation to Sponsor Longevity and Aging Conferences

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1

Proposal For Budget Allocation to Sponsor Longevity and Aging Conferences

Specification

Project Lead: Max Unfried, Alex Dobrin

Team: Awareness & SciComm WG contributors

Budget: 20,000 USD

Summary

In the past decision making on how conferences were sponsored were opaque. This led to some conferences being sponsored without full governance, due to miscommunication. In the future we try to improve this.

In the previous year we have sponsored Longevity conferences for a total of 11,000 USD.
For the coming year we plan on ramping this up to build a larger and stronger longevity community, especially bringing in more researchers that contribute to the DAO.

Therefore, this proposal seeks to request a budget of 20,000 USD for the next ~8 month (until June 30th, 2023) to sponsor Longevity and Aging Conferences and Events and give the SciComm and Awareness WG decision power for which events to be sponsored. This way responsibility and governance for longevity conference sponsorship is clear, and people can be held accountable.

The money will be spent to sponsor 5-8 longevity events, across the globe and build a global presence. We will only sponsor conferences where VitaDAO people are present, and VitaDAO has a chance to present itself through either a poster, booth, panel, presentation, leading a session or organizing of an entire event, and focus mainly on non-profit conferences.

An incomplete list of conferences to be considered sponsoring (please suggest others):

Europe:
Longevity Med Summit – Lisbon
Gordan Research Conference for the Biology of Aging - Barcelona
German Society for Aging Research - Jena

ERIBA (European Research Institute of the Biology of Aging) - Groningen
ARDD (Aging Research and Drug Discovery) - Copenhagen
Longevity Summit Dublin - Dublin
Rejuvenation Startup Summit - Berlin

North America:
Longevity Summit at Buck Institute – California, December
Coldspring Harbor - NY
KLC on the Biology of Aging - Colorado

Asia & Pacific:
Japan - The 9th Asian Conference on Aging & Gerontology (AGen2023)
Singapore - Singapore Longevity Conference
China - TBD
Korea - TBD
Australia - TBD
New Zealand - TBD

  • Agree
  • Agree with revisions (please comment)
  • Disagree

0 voters

2

Awesome proposal and list of longevity conferences, not sure if its the exact right amount of initiatives, but generally supportive!!

1 Like
3

Great! Suggest this list: Aging Conferences

Why more budget than last year?
Are you thinking most of this will be for our own initiatives like the Crypto meets Longevity Symposium?

A rough idea would be great.

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4

Thanks for the list :slight_smile:

The budget is increased as this year we will focus more on building and extending the VitaDAO community with researchers that actively participate in the DAO. In the last Year, due to Corona still many conferences were postponed, canceled or only held virtually, hence sponsoring didn’t make too much sense. Now that things are happening in the real world again an increased budget accounts for that.

This budget is mainly for external initiatives.

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5

Whats the main measurement by which you’d measure success and how much would we be willing to sponsor for specific benefits? Think the risk might be sometimes in general with conferences sponsoring a bigger amount for very little benefit compared to say attending and presenting for free.

3 Likes
6

Most sponsorships should be within 1000-2500$ I’d say, with the occasional higher one.
And yes - if we can speak for free it’s all the better, won’t be always available though, especially as we are a non-academic entity.
Success Metrics: Ideally we would have something thats easy measurable, e.g new people signing up on discord, new projects, or token holders - issue with that is that that’s in longevity probably delayed.
The way I think about it its more long term success if Academia is taking us serious and thinks we are trustworthy enough to cooperate with(many are still critical!). But to get there we have to constantly work on building this trust with academics and the institutions, by working with them and helping them by being useful. And conference sponsoring is one of those easy ways to be useful to them.
Let me know if you have any metrics have in mind :slight_smile:

2 Likes
7

Agreed, sponsorships are usually >>1k, so this 20k won’t go far enough. We should cover all of the high quality conferences that we can! It’s money well spent to raise awareness among our core audience of geroscientists. :slight_smile:

1 Like