Holochain, beyond blockchain. A Bristol hackathon.

9th & 10th December 2017.

Amazing things happen when people come together of their own volition to share knowledge and skills, and build things together.

During the weekend in December, Bristol hosted the first UK Holochain Hackathon. A group of bright minds and compassionate beings spent the weekend exploring what can be done though critical application of modern tech to address social and environmental challenges.

Context

The community technology scene in Bristol is well established, well funded, and varied. Bristol has been described as the perfect storm, old and new money alongside poverty and homelessness, rebellious grassroots politics, a strong social and environmental activism scene, a local political establishment pressured by the threat of reduced funding, a booming high tech sector — increasingly referred to as Silicon Gorge. Bristol is home to a large number of progressive organisations and projects (e.g. our own home grown local currency — the Bristol Pound; Triodos Bank; and the Soil Association).

It is unsurprising that Bristol is tapped into the developments of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. A talk on Blockchain tech, held at the Engine Shed on the 7th of December, was full to capacity, with a waiting list of over 100 people. At the time of publishing this article, Bitcoin is valued at almost $12000 (18.01.2017). Digital currencies and distributed computing are booming. With a number of related meet-up groups and commercial activity emerging, Bristol is now asserting itself as dynamically active in the crypto-tech space. Grassroots and corporate initiatives are growing to compliment long standing local university prowess in cryptographic computing (e.g. the Bristol Cryptography group).

Holochain and Holo

Holochain provides a computational code framework for distributed computing and mutual-credit accounting. Holo is built using Holochain, and allows easy engagement of Holochain based apps for non-technical users. See Holochain.org and Holo.host for more information.

When Holo launched a crowd funding campaign on December 5th 2017, they achieved their goal in 3 days and 6 hours! Holo has secured a community owned, powerful infrastructure on which to stabilise a distributed system. Holo ICO is launched on the 23rd Jan. Whitelisting for controlled token distribution has already started. See www.holo.host/ico for more details. #HelloHolo #Holochats.

This is cutting edge stuff that brings together the intelligent, compassionate, and curious folks wanting to help improve our world and move towards a more equitable future.

The hackathon event

The weekend long event was designed to support people interested in developing apps that make use of the possibilities that come with cryptocurrency and distributed computing. In keeping with the tradition of hackathons, we gathered on Saturday morning and shared ideas and plans to develop next generation technologies.

The weekend’s projects included: progressive local currencies (e.g. extending the Bristol Pound), developing voting / polling apps, making a ledger for shared insurance claims, ticketing for an event in 2027, a distributed market place, an art provenance ledger, supporting homeless people and smart payments for a distributed energy grid.

Following introductions, a breakfast of patisseries, fresh juice, fruit, tea and coffee, and the opportunity for participants to ‘shout out’ project ideas that they would like to work on, Christopher Reay led a technical introduction to distributed computing and Holochain specifically. An innovative exercise using post-its, paper and participants walking around the room and interacting with each other to model the information architecture of Holochain allowed us to model in low-fi what happens in the tech. In brief: individuals’ source chains and distributed hash tables that function within Apps.

I felt very lucky to be amongst such a group of motivated and bright minds. More than a dozen developers and a range of currency and digital civics experts collaborated. Some participants dove straight into developing their application. While a number of us explored the potential of Holochain to support local and pressing humanitarian issues through conversation and ideation.

By lunchtime, a number of participants had successfully installed Holochain and its twitter clone, Clutter.

As a concurrent work stream alongside the tech hacking, on Saturday afternoon, a discussion based community project symposium was held. Babs Needham and David Saunders, two local activists and social entrepreneurs gave short presentations on; Problems and potentials of homeless support and Smart solar energy distribution in and around Bristol.

• Babs has developed a strong model for an App — Eat, Sleep, Sit — that would provide homeless people with information about local provision support and opportunity for those without money or homes.
• David Saunders shared a sophisticated model of equitable ownership of energy production and supply.

Following these presentations, we explored some of the challenges in these areas — such as enabling a secure identity verification for homeless people.

Through this session we briefly talked through a number of other local, national, and international projects. We kept with the event goals of exploring how Holochain can support socially-, and environmentally-progressive issues. Projects such as Village Lab, Enspiral, the Collaborative Tech Alliance and Civic Stack provided rich food for thought about current and emerging potentials for technologically enabled positive social reform. Metacurrecy and metacapital provide powerful frameworks for aligned thought about value and flows of value.

Much of the conversation through the weekend was focused on developing ideas around currencies. For example, Nick Hemley, founder of Bristech meetup group (+CiC), Head of Development at Scott Logic and the primary IT Consultant for Bristol Pound talked through some of the potentials and challenges around shifting the Bristol Pound to a cryptocurrency.

We were lucky to have the company of Jude English, City Councilor (The Green Party) for Ashley Ward. Ashley Ward is home to a rich cultural diversity and intersects with the stokes croft region in Bristol that has, in recent years, been one of the most active sites of corporate resistance in the UK, and continues to bring together rebellious thinkers via the people’s republic of Stokes Croft and other fora. Jude expressed interest in developing our local currency, and brought focus to needs of developing inclusive governance mechanisms, including but not limited to voting (click here for a short video with Jude speaking at the hackathon).

Trevor Hilder, Dil Green, and John Waters brought a wealth of knowledge, skills, and vision that enriched the event in a number of ways. Check out this video for insight into some of the conversation (on a Sunday morning, no less!) that bridged and built on our collective intelligence.

David Bovill presented sophisticated ideas and tools for social change. For example, how sport and specifically the Football World cup could provide an entrance point to normalise progressive tech. David has helped make a powerful tool — Federated Wiki — click this video link to see David’s presentation of this Wiki format. Federated Wiki, Fractal Wiki and Holochain tech will be developed through a London-based hackathon at the end of January see here for details)

The projects developed through the Bristol hackathon weekend also included Wesley Blamco’s ideas around Claim-chain. David Beasley, Chris Covendale and Diana Krusteva developed different aspects of a voting app. Diago Guerrero Moral working with Dil to develop a plan for how Holochain can be used as a back end for a ticketing system. Greg Smart, Tarim, Chris Morton, and a number of other experts and enthusiasts shared their analytical and technological skills to help groups actively working on the tech components of the projects.

After another morning of enthusiasm and productivity on Sunday, we had a live feed Zoom conversation with Art and Eric — founders of Holochain that led into presentations from those participants that had been working on projects through the weekend. Watch presentations here: **link**

Congratulations to Diana and Chris, for winning the prizes of 2 Holoports for their work on a voting app (github repo); and to Diana and Karl for being awarded the accolade of most supportive participant (in a technical, and non-technical capacity).

Thank you

Thank you to all of the event participants. Major appreciation to Christopher and Ray for helping run the event, and being available to support with the technical questions of developing with Holochain. Thank you to Radecks Chocolates, Eat-a-Pitta, Bearittos, Big Juice et al. for providing nourishment. Thanks to the Holochain team execs for funding the event.