Living knowledge network / Blockchain For Science Hackathon LONDON #Blockathon

Join us for a weekend of blockchain hacking!

The current science world is grown from legacy structures - hey, we are doing good science and science is a pivotal part of our society and in most of our daily lives. So no reason to be all pessimistic.

However, myriad of media breaches, incompatibilities, locked-away-data gives us the notion that it could be different. Mainy claim that the blockchain revolution offers great potential for Science and Knowledge creation. Immutable data trails, novel means to research money distribution, privacy-assured data handling and even crowdfunding methods arise – just to name a few.

Might be all true, however, we will take it a step further:

We envisioning a system that will contain the whole research cycle in one closed-looped system. From data acquisition, post-processing, storage, calculation, scientific reasoning as well as incentivisation and research funding - all in one system.

As a starting point, we take abstractions from bitcoin and while its miners assure the integrity of the blockchain the guardians of the living knowledge network will assure that science is kept honest and meaningful, all also with the knowledge token that will incentivise participants. However, we understand that verifying transactions on the bitcoin blockchain is much easier than verifying science - but various implementations and abstractions could lead us there and we must start somewhere right, and we want serendipity to happen…

With this hackathon we want to bring science interested (blockchain) tech community together data scientists, networks and other developers and hope to create engagement and to win talent for the living knowledge network. There will be talks some talks (PC, MAC, LINUX), install node.js, git and other standard developer tools. Please note, that tech talent on all levels is appreciated, the motivation is key!

Program:

Fri. 1st of December

19:00 Potential meetup with talks @ 3 crowns pub

Saturday Sat 2nd of December 

09:00 Start, Registration

09.25 Breakfast

10:00 Opening remarks

Intro to challenges by:

10:10 Collaboration Future Of (Roman)

10:20 Future of Peer review (Sönke)

10:30 Network Data Science (James)

10.30 Knowledge Token (t.b.d.)

11:00 Team Formation

11:25 Team Registration – Start hacking!

13:30 Lunch

16:00 Talk: Cryptoeconomy for Science - Bazil Azmil

18:30 Dinner

21:00 Exit

Sun 3rd of December

10:00 Arrive and start hacking

14:00 Talk (t.b.d.)

16:00 Pitching session begins

Commiunity voting through Knowledege tokens

17:00 Winners announced

17:10 Closing remarks

17:30 …  Networking, drinks and nibbles

Rules

The core part of the solution to the challenge must be written over the weekend

Please check your code into a repository (Github, Bitbucket etc) with an open source software license of your choice

When you’ve assembled your team, please let us know your team name, participants, which challenge you’re entering, and your code repository URL

Please sign the terms and conditions form (on the day)

You retain your IP

Teams & Pitching

We have a 2 hour slot for pitching with 10 minutes for the judges to convene

We’d like you to give a 5 minute pitch and/or demo, and allow 2 minutes for Q&A

If you don't have time for a demo – screen shots are OK

Pitches need to be tight and punchy! Make sure you practice in advance

We can really only handle 15 teams if we want to keep to the timeline

We don't want to set a minimum team size, but we would strongly encourage you to form teams of 4 people or more

Community engagement: Webpage BlockchainForScience