Mentoring at Diffusion Hackathon
On the 19th and 20th October at Factory Berlin some of the world’s most important Web 3 protocols and leaders in blockchain, from across The Convergence Stack came together for a 2-day in-person dev con made up of hacks, exclusive product launches, and live demos.
About the hackathon
Diffusion Hackathon is a two-day event with the focus on the practical application of open-source distributed ledger technology, smart contracts, machine learning, and programmable tokens, to create a new data layer. It brought together leading decentralized projects and their tribes, developers, economists, system engineers, enterprise and technical academia to define the next major web cycle.
Hacking is based on The Convergence Stack which is Web 3 protocols in blockchain, AI, IoT, and Big Data.
Leading practitioners from cryptography, machine learning, smart contract dev, IoT, systems engineers, and crypto-economics were exploring the implications of deploying new technologies and distributed systems in complex and challenging fields such as smart cities, Industry 4.0, and Mobility.
How can you leverage the Convergence Stack to do Good, with a capital G? How do we create an infrastructure for collaborative knowledge networks? How do we create Crypto-economic systems that will allow us to establish new rules and economic incentives for blockchain ecosystems? What can you achieve with machine learning with the ever-growing open datasets that decentralized systems themselves produce? How do we enable access control in decentralized systems? How do we share data over a trusted network, without losing time, reducing trust and ownership? How do we make every interaction that a user has with a smart contract understandable and safe? How do we onboard the 99% of developers and organizations who are not into Web 3 yet?
These are just some of the questions that Diffusion hackers were seeking answers to at selected hackathon tracks:
A Stack for Good: your moonshot for a better world (this one had some really great projects)
ETHBerlin and the DoD: community improvement bounties
Web 2.5: onboarding the rest of the world to decentralized technology
The Odyssey Serendipity Network: growing a network of ecosystems
Token Engineering: (re-)invent economic mechanisms by using simulations
Machine Learning in the Decentralised World: opening the AI silos
Shaking Up the Model: data and compute in different places
Sharing in Consortia Networks: permissioned, tokenized data sharing with T-Labs
The Usable Stack: new and better ways to use Web 3
Identity and beyond with Hyperledger: credentials for digital trust
Mentoring and Hacking, why not do both?
The moment I heard about Diffusion got me really excited and I knew I wanted to be there, either as a hacker or a mentor. Since I mentored at ETH Berlin Zwei two months earlier I figured it would be best to continue in the same direction, so I applied ... and got accepted!
I was mentoring about User experience (UX) - for projects that build a product that will be used directly by people, e.g. a DApp or a service. My initial track of choice was The Usable Stack (new and better ways to use Web 3). A word about the track from the organizers:
It’s been ten years since the inception of blockchain, and using crypto and DApps is still hard. Too hard for the widespread adoption it deserves. Things are getting better: there are many great initiatives to make accessing DApps easier for new users, such as Metamask, Portis, and Torus, but to an extent, these are only scratching the surface of great Web 3 user experience. How do we not only lower the barrier of entry but make every interaction that a user has with a smart contract understandable and safe? As we extend the usage of distributed ledgers from simple value transactions to elaborate smart contracts and realize an open data economy, how do we provide ways for users to interact with it, without creating new centralized gatekeepers?
Web 2.5 (onboarding the rest of the world to decentralized technology) which I call The Liminal Web has been my second choice because it tackles the problems on how to assist people in transition from current Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 looking at current problems and future scenarios from user perspective, how we communicate the value, find the best product-user fit and offer the tools needed to make that transition.
Our Hack-along crew was also participating and since I’m close to them on a daily basis I was also considering hacking along.
My mentoring duties have been priority and I scheduled my calendar to listen to some interesting talks which I outline below.
Into the talks ...
Enterprise interest in blockchain
Customer need: Uncertainty and complexity prohibit adoption of DLTS We have a lot of people who are not familiar with BC and can easily deploy their node.
Stax:
dApp
Connectivity
Payment
Data verification
Storage
Identity
Security
Our aim is to create a network of devices and don’t need to enable your data every time, just once.
Odyssey: ecosystems for good
Rutger van Zuidam gave a talk about the Odyssey hackathon, the bigger picture, vision, mission and explained the process and approach in building new ecosystems for mass collaboration.
Notes from the talk...
Odyssey hackathon is used as a time-traveling device. Portal of the future opens and co-create with your future clients future solution and take it back. What can you do with it after the hackathon?
We’re building the infrastructure for ecosystems for mass collaboration.
Complex challenges:
Multitude of stakeholders
Borderless + Interconnected
No one can hold all the information
Not:
Linear, top-down leadership
Money
Who thinks that the Amazon rainforest is your responsibility? What can you do about it? What is the best tool to use it and how do we scale it? How do we incubate all the ecosystems in solving together all these problems? Complex challenges like these need all stakeholders. The ecosystem awareness that can allow people to act on the whole. Group A is not building something for Group B, Group A is building for Group A, we’re all part of a greater whole.
The emergence of the collaborative layer of the internet. An operating system for our global society. Ecosystem + Token = New market. The ecosystem grows, the cost of collaboration drops and creates new business opportunities.
How can you validate green energy going into the grid but without installing IoT devices? Vattenfall brought their competition on board, everyone from the ecosystem, all stakeholders. They all go and do the hackathon and program through a transformation. Then you encounter a new world together. If the team come to the hackathon to build what they planned to build then why did they come to the hackathon?
From hyper-competition IQ to hyper-collaboration EQ (emotional) and SQ (spiritual).
More and more emphasis is put on the human processes which make the difference and sets the DNA and culture of the Ecosystem. It allows people to understand each other, that’s what we’re looking for.
We need board members to understand the complexities of the 21st century and find a bridge to get onboard.
Fission talk: licensing open-source software
Open-source licensing evolution.
What does OS mean? Lcinscing, community, voting, democracy, mob rule?
Definition of OS:
Legal innovation of licenses
Way of working together in code, collaboratively, asynchronously, remotely (large corps did this)
Ideology of code re-use & sharing (gentle versions of)
Commons-based peer production: Lot’s of people work on it, everybody benefits from it and people can build on it even in revenue-generating fashion.
Open source is not a business model.
Why do you choose a license? Is it because of distribution, free labor from contributors, lock it open?
We forgot about a lot of stuff we fought 15years ago. Devs and biz people don’t spend much time which licensed they pick and why?
The copyleft (against copyright). GPL (don’t need to share your changes in code, keep it closed) and AGPL (mus share changes back).
Apple is moving from Bash to Zsh because of licensing, it’s GPL v2 and the new version uses v3. This is to think about licensing in business context.
Licensing innovation is in fact one of the definitions of OS. Cloud providers are making record profits from OS contributors.
Should we licenses who restrict others to do business even call licenses? It’s really weird when your biggest competitor is running your software (Amazon)
License Zero
Licensing as a business model, pay attention to this. Parity and Prosperity are two new licenses. Sell licenses over command line to individuals and companies. Automatically get licenses if you sponsor on Patreon or Github sponsorship.
Do you think current open software licenses are the best we’ll ever have? NO!
Cross License Collaboratives: “Maintain your projects and create shared moneymaking opportunity without any company, foundation or dictator.”
If we can get China and India into open-source collaboration. Just number wise it would be huge!
Anti 996 License - releasing software to companies to comply with local labor regulations.
Data Ethics We start seeing people saying “Maybe I don’t want FB and Google have all my data with them?” Blockstack - Can’t be evil as opposed to Google’s “Don’t be evel”, but it’s not just about the technology. It’s about principles like Fair data scotiey, Local First Software and licences like Cryptographic Autonomy Licences, Icepick.
If we start tunning our own IPFS local servers we’re saving server resources, which saves us a lot of money. - Constellation provider
Step 1 from going into production should from your laptop! Give developers tools to keep date user-controlled.
Why are we not making smart contracts that are deployed once, audited once and we can all contribute to them, in an open-source collaborative fashion? Where we have a global shared rich environment that we should make us of.
Into the hacks...
Here are a couple of projects that caught my attention. You can browse all teams and projects here.
Fission Live
Host your app from your laptop.
Fission is building a backend-as-a-service that will include hosting, database, identity & more. Their service lets you instantly update files, directories and obviously websites directly to IPFS and serve them anywhere.
At Diffusion, they’re launching the first piece, FissionLive. FissionLive allows you to host your app, whether it’s a static website or a Single Page App, directly from your laptop.
Here you can follow the steps and try it yourself (I’m installing it as I write this). Having not much technical background it was super easy for me to set it up. Thanks to Boris Mann and Brooklyn Zelenka who worked hard on this to ship it before the hackathon started. Go, try it out!
Spekboom
I met Denham Preen outside at the courtyard and he explained to me the idea behind the project they’re hacking. They figured there’s a plant called Spekboom in the Karoo of South Africa that provides one of the most cost-effective carbon offset solutions. It grows on the eroded ground and you basically can’t do anything with that plant or the soil on which the plant lives. So why not make use of it?
Spekboom (aka Portulacaria afra) is a succulent that helps fight air pollution. It has the ability to 'sequester' or capture four to ten tons of carbon per hectare! Essentially, it acts as a carbon sponge, absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and turning it into plant matter.
They built a system that connects plantations and farmers (landowners) to everyone allowing to buy carbon credits
Plantations are always for sale as NFTs. Holding an NFT continuously generates verifiable carbon credits (ERC20 tokens). Corporations can burn carbon credits to transparently showcase they are carbon neutral. The Harberger tax received from the entities holding the always for sale NFTs, flows directly to the farmers for income and the upkeep of the spekboom plantations.
They used Ocean protocol to implement functionality where Carbon generation and Carbon use data gathered from our use-case. This is our step toward kick-starting a Data Economy!
To show where the spekboom plantations are they used FOAM to enable a crowdsourced map and decentralized location services.
CarbonCreditsClub (name of the team) won several awards at the hackathon and very well deserved. Kudos to the team: Denham, Jason, and Jonjon.
https://devpost.com/software/assetnomics https://carboncredits.club/
Hack-along
Mentors were allowed to participate in the hackathon, so I took advantage of that although I did not contribute that much as I wished. I was part of the Hack-along team (Liminal Village) together with Josh, Thomas, Pavle, Vlad, with a partial presence from Jakub (a very smart guy from Prague).
The system being designed intends to co-opt short term extractive behavior into long term resilience for people and planet via a triple bottom line of people, planet and profit. We want to outcompete (hyper)capitalism.
We split the pie (funds/resources) on the streams via a monthly proposal process that deploys a splitter. Personal streams are transferred directly to your personal wallet. Local streams go to a community DAO that uses liquid pledging to allocate funds into internal projects (like co-budget). The global stream is for when personal and local streams reach their cap when this happens excess overflows into ecosystem partner DAOs.
What's next for Hack-along? Harmonization phase back at the Village to tidy up and integrate various parts that have been contributed from a pluralistic whole.
We’re already forming new teams and doing preparation work for the Odyssey 2020 Hackathon.
Closing words
This hackathon was good, quality content, very knowledgeable people, very good tech being showcased and used, great talks (mostly technical) and great organization all around. Kudos to Jamie, Charlotte, Aron, Matt, Scott and everyone from the Diffusion team. I’m looking forward to the next hack!