Living Knowledge Network – London Blockchain Hackathon #ScienceBlockathon

The scientific endeavor has brought remarkable technological progress and plays a pivotal role in 21st-century life. However, media breaches, incompatibilities and locked-away-data all present problems and there are still a number of changes needed to improve the scientific process. Many claim that the blockchain offers great potential for Science and Knowledge creation – immutable data trails, novel means for research money distribution, privacy-assured data handling and even crowdfunding methods present possibilities.

We envision 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.

As a starting point, we’ll 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 with a 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 need to start somewhere.

With this hackathon, we want to engage and inspire the science-interested tech community. There will be a series of talks and sessions run using standard developer tools and on PC, MAC and Linux operating systems.

We’re looking for tech talent from all levels of capability – what’s important is your passion for creating future blockchain technologies!

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

Community voting through Knowledge 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 two-hour slot for pitching with 10 minutes for the judges to convene
• We’d like you to give a five-minute pitch and/or demo, and allow two minutes for Q&A
• If you don’t have time for a demo – screenshots 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 four people or more