The Blockternship, a Giveth Galaxy Project

The following is the final post outlining the results of Giveth’s Social Coding Blockternship, and how the winners were determined.

We are at the close of this two-month distributed hackathon, into which 19 projects entered, and 6 made it all the way through. This event was made possible with the help of our co-sponsors Ethereum Community Fund, Aragon, Swarm City, Status, and Chain Shot. Each of the teams that entered worked on a new or existing open-source project to be built on the Ethereum blockchain. At its conclusion, we asked all the teams to evaluate themselves and their performances, and then we asked each project to vote for the winners.

The voting results are in:

Smart Contract Sommelier Award — CanAirIO Air Quality DApp (10 ETH Prize)

CanAirIO is a citizen science initiative for air quality tracking, visualization, and dissemination of this information. The Air Quality DApp is a distributed public health application that allows users to connect air pollution sensors in order to crowdsource data on air quality. The DApp rewards users for contributing data via ETH donations.

This project consists of an Android application, which combines air quality reports with an ETH wallet, a DApp, and Solidity contract Donor Vault for rewarding contributors.

For more information on this project, see https://github.com/Blockternship/dapp-airquality.

Blockchain Brilliance Award — Dpanc (6 ETH Prize)

Dpanc, which stands for “Decentralized Pancreas,” is a health management application for Diabetes. The aim of Dpanc is to offer a new tool to diabetics so they might better manage their health. This an open-source, decentralized diabetes management system, which stores patients’ medical information on the blockchain. This voluntarily provided data from glucose monitors will eventually be able to be used to create a new, dynamic method of controlling type one diabetes.

For more information on this project, see https://github.com/Blockternship/dPanc.

DAO Dominator Award — Kyodo (4 ETH Prize)

Kyodo is an Ethereum-based web application that provides a crypto-economic incentive tool for DAOs. It provides both an impression revenue model and a task management model of financial incentive. Created to help run “Decent.Fund,” whose mission is to contribute to the mass adoption of the decentralized solutions, bringing the concepts of the new crypto economy closer to the unchained world.

For more information on this project, see https://github.com/Blockternship/kyodo.

How did we choose the winners?

Rather than use a panel of judges, we wanted to have the participants themselves choose the winner, and this created an interesting problem. In this situation, it was likely that every participant would vote for themselves, leaving the contest at a six-way tie. In order to stop this from happening, we asked the participants to answer two questions: who would you choose as the overall winner, and how would you rank the projects, from one to six. This gave us two data points to work with.

The first question of Overall Winner would likely have been a six way tie, but in this case one person voted for another project. This gave us two points for the first place position, and left us with a four way tie for second place.

The second question, the ranked vote on the projects, became the tie-breaker. We tallied the votes by adding together the number of the ranks, from one to six, that each of the teams rated the projects at. When this happened, the ranks sorted themselves out perfectly.

By adding the numbers of the ranks together, and ordering the totals from smallest to largest, we end up with a clear indication of the ranks of the winners. Here is an example with four participants in such a vote:

In this case, team A is the winner with the lowest number, and also because of the fact that it was voted first place by two different teams. The second, third, and fourth places sorted themselves out here naturally.

A final note…

We would like to take this opportunity, on behalf of the Giveth Galaxy, to thank all those who participated in the Blockternship Hackathon. It’s events like this that make Social Coding what it is: a place for learning, creating, and building community.