Hacking with Waves
For several years, the Odyssey hackathon, held in the Netherlands, had provided opportunities for a mass collaboration of developers from all over the world.
This year, Odyssey for the first time was hosted online. The event’s team made special efforts to ensure the hackathon would be a unique and efficient experience for participants: they even launched a 3D online arena that connected all the 105 teams, jedis and challenge hosts in one space.
The Waves Association was honored to participate in the event in several aspects. First, the Waves protocol was suggested as a building block with support from Waves Jedis: Rob van de Camp and Inal Kardanov. Second, the Waves platform was used for issuing awards to winning teams. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for digital art were created on Waves and sent to participants as a special prize.
Meanwhile, a Waves Team participated in the hackathon as one of the 105 competing squads. The challenge that the team aimed to solve was provided by the Dutch police: Inclusive Safety Communities that coordinate citizens in emergency situations. To get a better understanding of the event, watch its trailer:
The Waves team did well over the hackathon weekend, coming up with a protocol for uniting people in emergency cases called Steun. This solution included different modules: a web app for a dispatch center, an application for citizens with a special certification module built with previous Certificado experience in mind and, what was especially appreciated by the jury, a framework for certification of citizens’ soft skills.
This is how the Dutch police’s Sander Koot, the challenge lead, solution advisor and a jury member, commented on the concept and its prospects:
Sander Koot, challenge lead
In comparison to other teams, the Waves team had to cope with less preparation time. Nonetheless, the team did a great job of listening to the stakeholders and finding the ‘sweet spots’ other teams missed. And they were really able to work towards concepts that actually can help! In the Netherlands, civil participation is a well-known (and exercised) concept with over 3 million active participants. The first step will be to select citizens based on verified credentials, matched to the specific emergency situation. But the solution of the Waves team will enable us to take it one step further. To add soft skills and competences to the verified professionals, so you don’t only get the right help on paper but get the right help that proves itself (and has proven itself) in real life. We want to further explore this step with the Waves team as a follow-up of the first step I’ve just described and also on collaboration platforms in crisis situations where finding the right person is key in crisis management.
The solution presented to the jury at the end of the event was the result of 3-day hard work. The very idea was several times revised over the course of the weekend. Read comments from Albert, the team’s tech lead:
Albert Iblyaminov, Waves team
There was a lot of communication between the teams, although it was an online hackathon. It was interesting to “rotate” our project as a Rubik’s cube, which would test it in possible collaborations with other teams. And our solution, which looked very flexible and scalable, turned out to be too cumbersome and complicated. We realized that we needed stronger separation of the project’s basic idea from possible scenarios of its development and expansion.
Certainly, the Waves team did its best to build a wider solution, even an ecosystem around the certification protocol. On the one hand, it produced what Odyssey was looking for: crazy creativity aiming to change people’s lives in a global way. But, at the same time, the solution was “too large” for the jury, and the Waves team didn’t win the challenge prize. Still, we won the Ecosystem prize for the largest solution among all the 105 hackathon teams. Here are insights from Vitaly, who handled external communications for the Waves team:
Vitaly Smirnov, Waves team
Our team really enjoyed this event, since we had an amazing opportunity to work on finding a solution for important problems with great guidance from experienced mentors. Also, working closely with the other 104 talented teams provided us with more collaboration options and led to the largest ecosystem prize. Everyone at Odyssey was very open to communication and shared ideas freely, because we all had a common goal of making the world better by using tech. The Waves team should participate or even host such events more often, in order to spread the idea of using the Waves protocol for a greater future across the world.
As I’ve already mentioned, the Waves protocol was used not only for our team’s solution but also for the issuance of special prizes for winning teams in the form of NFTs, in partnership with Coinranking. This amazing work was done by Inal Kardanov, who also was participating in the event as Waves Jedi.
Inal Kardanov, Waves Jedi
The Odyssey team did a great job — despite all the problems caused by COVID-19 and lockdowns — or, maybe, thanks to them, they created one of the best online platforms for running such an event. It was great to see many teams working on different solutions and communicating on the platform.
During the Momentum I had a pleasure to chat with many teams about their projects, and it was insightful and joyful.
Also, the Odyssey team asked us to help with rewarding hackathon winners and we issued special non-fungible tokens on the Waves platform. Every token was unique not only from the tech point of view, but it was unique from the design perspective. So, I would say that NFTs were art objects based on Momentum communications. We are proud of the result we achieved with the Odyssey team and Coinranking to create an integration in a very short timeframe.
And many congratulations to the Waves team and their captain Vladimir Zhuravlev. They built an amazing project, and their prize was absolutely deserved! I hope to see their application live in the nearest future.
For sure, the virtual 3D-arena built by the Odyssey Team was inspiring, and connecting it with blockchain technology opens even more inspiring opportunities. This is how Rob, Waves Jedi and the main Waves representative in the Odyssey space for the past few years, comments on how Odyssey came to this format:
Rob van de Camp, Waves Jedi
Redefining “Building the aircraft while flying” is the best summing up of this season at Odyssey. I guess, we all know now how close the call was to completely cancel or postpone the event in November, but Odyssey took the gamble, and I’d say it worked out pretty well for them.
We have all experienced a glimpse of what our reality could be for as long as COVID-19 is around, many improvements needed, many bugs to be squashed… but WOW! It showed all of its potential. Getting as close to an offline event as possible is a massive task, but Odyssey managed to at least copy a big part of the systematics and atmosphere that the offline event usually has.
Of course, I should not forget to thank Vladimir, our team captain, who was able to process a lot of information in a super-short amount of time (we had to switch out our entire team just 5 weeks prior to the event due to unforeseen circumstances), and still made sure Waves will be a name to remember after Momentum!
All in all, It was an amazing event, full of insights, emotions, collaborations and hard work! Waves has now participated in the last few seasons of Odyssey, so we are looking forward to the next ones. No matter if the next edition of Odyssey will be an offline or online event, there are no doubts that it will be legendary as always.
I would like to thank everyone who made this happening: the Odyssey team, challenge leads and stakeholders, Jedis who helped us a lot during the Momentum, teams who we talked to and found a way to boost each other and, of course, the Waves team with everyone who has contributed to it from the beginning: Rob van de Camp, Matvey Voytov, Inal Kardanov, Albert Iblyaminov, Grigory Ablyazov, George Ilushenko and Vitaly Smirnov.
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