Built to Explore: The Skynet Spring 2021 Hackathon!

It is with great pleasure that I am announcing our Spring 2021 hackathon, featuring more than $25,000 in prizes for participants. The hackathon is focused around content and media, and for the first time ever we are opening the prize pool to every single member of the community. Official kickoff will be on April 9th!

Sign up here: https://gitcoin.co/hackathon/built-to-explore/onboard

The hackathon is going to be broken into three phases. Phase one is the build phase, featuring the largest prize pool at more than $20,000. Hackers will work in teams to build applications that empower community members to build, share, and interact with content and media on Skynet.

Phase two is the explore phase, featuring a prize pool of more than $3,000. The Skynet community will have 2 weeks to play around with the apps made during the build phase, and prizes will be awarded through the explore phase to the community members that create the best content and most popular content.

The final phase is the dream phase, featuring a $2,000 prize pool and dedicated to looking towards the future. Participants will be invited to create essays and other forward-looking works of art which attempt to imagine a world where decentralization has succeeded.

Core Focus: Content and Media

The major theme of this hackathon is content, media, publishing, and sharing. We want developers to create applications that allow users to share things with the world. Whether those “things” are memes, shower thoughts, photos, videos, blog posts, playlists, galleries of memes made by other people, commentaries, code snippets, or nearly anything else, we are looking for applications that allow users to express themselves and share it with the world.

We are also looking for applications that allow users to interact with content. For example, an application that loads content from other applications and allows users to write comments about that content.

A key criteria for determining the grand prize winner of the hackathon will be its success during the explore phase. Applications that get the most users and generate the most interesting content will be most strongly considered for the grand prize. This is the first hackathon where we will be focusing primarily on how users interact with the application in the wild for our judging criteria.

This is also the first hackathon where we will be awarding prizes to users! We want users to leverage the strengths of the hacker’s applications to the greatest degree, and we will be awarding users that create particularly interesting content and that create content which gains large popularity.

Content Leaderboard!

During the explore phase, we will be tracking all content on a decentralized leaderboard! Content that users create will be automatically submitted to the leaderboard, and any user interactions with that content will also be tracked and submitted to the leaderboard. For example, a user that creates a gallery using SkyGallery would see their gallery appear on the leaderboard with 1 point. If that gallery is then posted to SkyFeed where it receives comments and reactions from 5 different users, their gallery would jump to having 6 points on the leaderboard.

The leaderboard will also track the total activity coming from each application. In the example above, SkyGallery would be awarded 6 points for the creation of the content and subsequent success of that content. SkyFeed would be awarded 5 points for facilitating the interactions with SkyGallery.

Though the leaderboard will be used to guide judging, it will not be the sole criteria for picking the grand prize winner. We are well aware that certain types of content, such as memes, will have a much easier time gathering point than other types of content, such as long-form blog posts. When determining who should win prizes and which application should win the grand prize, we will take these differences into account.

The Hacker Toolkit

We aim to introduce a new technology to Skynet with each hackathon we host, and this time we will be introducing both MySky and the Data Access Controller, or DAC. Hackers will be leveraging MySky to store and manage data, and they will be able to make use of DACs to handle data that is shared between applications. We will be explaining both in greater detail in a subsequent blog post.

The first DAC we will be introducing is called ‘ContentRecord’, and it will be the main mechanism that applications use to report content and content interactions to the leaderboard.

All submissions to the hackathon must make use of MySky, must make use of the ContentRecord, and must either be a means for publishing new content, or must be a means for interacting with previously published content.

A Better Hackathon

As we continue to build the ecosystem around Skynet, we want to push the boundaries of community building and interaction. The explore phase and dream phase are both meant to include critical members of the Skynet ecosystem that have historically been unable to participate in our major events.

Everyone is important to the mission behind Skynet, and we want to ensure that everyone has a platform to both express themselves and push the mission forward. We can’t wait to see you on the competition floor.

It’s time to Terminate!