Ambassador Workshop - Playbook
A hopefully helpful playbook for setting up and hosting Ambassador Workshops. Emerged through the initial Ambassador Workshop concept bootstrapped in November 2025.
At first, a few recommendations for your Ambassador Workshop
- Keep the event organisers team as small as possible to avoid overhead for coordinations and administrative tasks. A Workshop can be easily organised by a single person
- Keep close coordinations and collaborations with the Cardano Foundation to ensure that the CF can provide support and participate at the event.
- Keep the event roots and basic, no fancy setup needed, also helps to keep costs low
- Choose a venue location off the grid, away from city noise & distractions, make it a space for ppl to calm down and relax.
Anyways, after all, its really up to you to decide what to take from our first Ambassador Workshop, and what you want to change or adjust. This playbook aims to be a guide which helps you setting up your event, not a rule book to which anyone has to adhere to.
1) Planning
1.1 Define the location
- Ensure the venue can host all attendees over the full timeframe of the workshop
- Ensure the venue can provide catering
- Ensure the venue has support materials for sessions (Beamer, Whiteboards, etc)
- Ensure the venue is off the grid
- Ensure easy access to the venue from airport/train stations
- Ideally add travel guidance for attendees to easily find travel connections from airport to the venue
1.2 Define the exact time
- Ensure the first and last day of the workshop for check-in, checkout
Note*
You can take following format, which worked quite well
Day 1 (Friday) - Arrival, check-in, Dinner at the evening
Day 2 (Saturday) - Workshop, Ambassador hosted sessions
Day 3 (Sunday) - Workshop, CF hosted sessions
Day 4 (Monday) - Departure, check-out, breakfast in the morning
1.3 Define the Agenda (Ambassadors & CF)
- Ensure Attendees are able to sign up their own sessions, best to use a simple google form
- Ensure CF attendees and let them host relevant sessions
1.4 Define the Signup
- An easy google-form where attendees can sign up and confirm attendance as well as submitting sessions they’d like to host at the event
1.5 Create Workshop website
Display all relevant information on the website such as
- Dates & Times
- Location
- Attendees
- Agenda
Ideally host the website code on a public available github, making the repo open source is another nice thing to do:
- Deploy your website code on a respective github
- Open source the github repository on which you host the code
Note*
You can use the Ambassador Workshop Europe website as example
https://github.com/Technosophorso/ambassador-workshop/tree/main
1.6 Setup your payment channel
The venue will probably need to be paid in fiat, make sure to have a bank account from which you or your collaborators can send payments to the venue.
- Setup payment channel
2) Launch Sign up
- Use a dedicated channel on the Cardano Ambassadors Slack (Coordinate with CF for channel setup) from where Workshop organisers can coordinate with attendees
- Publish and announce the Sign up via Slack and emails sent from official CF email to Ambassadors.
- Prepare yourself to provide support for Visa requests from Ambassadors, therefore you can ask the venue beforehand to provide a support document which makes it easier for Ambassadors to apply for visa if needed
With that, everything most important is done to get things setup.
3) Run the Event
3.1 Prepare the arrival day
- Organisers should be present at the venue before attendees join to make sure organisers are familiar with the location and can help arriving attendees with the check in
- If your venue is off the grid, make sure to have a driver & car available to emergency pick ups for Ambassadors who may have ended up taking wrong train/bus connections.
3.2 During the Workshop
- Make sure to take photos & videos from the event
- Make sure to coordinate with venue for everything needed during the event
- Times for breaks, catering, refreshments
- Special equipments for sessions (beamer, whiteboards, adapter, etc)
- Make sure your event responsibilities are carried out in the back to not distract anyone at session, can also say, you as organiser will have a busy as hell time so that everyone else should have a smooth & relaxing experience
4) Post Event Task
- Coordinate footage, setup a shared folder to which attendees can upload photos or videos from the event
- Create a report and summarise the event, best is to closely coordinate with CF, send them the draft and let them add/complement the report and receive feedback and suggestions for improvement before you publish the report
- Update the website to display event photos on a gallery and a reports page to publish final reports
- Publish & share the reports at the Ambassadors Community as well as publicly on social media