The Web3 Summit hackerspace was conceived for the community to hack their own projects and create their own programming for Web3 Summit. In this article, we review highlights from each Node.

The hackerspace massively exceeded our expectations! During the course of the three days, the community hosted over 60 gatherings across ten “Nodes.” These comprised a combination of workshops, design classes, coding camps, ethics debates, interactive demo’s, mini-hackathons, bug hunts, impromptu meetups, panel discussions, art exhibitions, virtual reality sessions and many other things we didn’t even know about.

Node 1: Design Thinking For Blockchains

Hosted by Patara — Burak Arikan, Cenk Dolek & Engin Erdogan

At the Design Thinking for Blockchains workshop, participants worked on a protocol idea for a decentralized education system focused on organized events. They modeled a decentralized ledger to keep verifiable records of continuous support interactions between Instructors and Students. The Node hosted a diverse group of disciplines and knowledge levels, which made the activity even more interesting and inclusive. Heated conversations took place that advocated various perspectives on incentives, transparency, verifiability, and intellectual property, all of which contributed to a memorable people-first system design exercise. The team summarised their experience here.

Node 2: Nature 2.0

Hosted by Garrett MacDonald, Ewald Hesse, Trent McConaghy

This Node was an oasis of calm, set amidst a small forest. Participants attended workshops and talks on the future of our natural world, addressing the specific issue of how nature will interact with humanity, in the same way as a person or a company does. Talks focused around new economic models for nature, namely, self-owning wind farms, roads that collect tolls and upgrade themselves, almost autonomously. Indeed any use case where nature can be self-sovereign, make decisions and create tangible economic value for itself. The team have created a Github repo where they will be posting bounties here.

Node 3: Decentralised Art

Hosted by Alexine Rodenhuis & Sam Brown

The Decentralized Art Node brought a unique voice to the Web3 Summit, where visitors were invited to shift their minds towards the more creative side of blockchain technologies. Within the node was an art exhibition curated by Alexine Rodenhuis and a collaborative drawing project led by artist Sam Brown.

The exhibition, titled Collective Creativity, brought together five works of seven international artists who are examining ideas and applications of decentralisation. The artists were: Anne de Boer , Grayson Earle and The Dark Inquiry, Sarah Friend, Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey, Cullen Miller and Gabriel Dunne .

From a Monero mining software programme which collects cryptocurrency to help bail people out of jail, to a spell-casting system that scripts incantations onto the Ethereum network, each art work contributed to an expanding conversation about the potential futures of artistic practice.

Whether practical or ideological, the underpinnings of each work were grounded in an ethos of collective action and purposeful distribution of power away from a singular artistic producer. Together the works presented a snapshot of an art world where creative action is communal, united and shared.

Node 4: User Experience

Hosted by CONFLUX — Aqueel Mohammad

In a primarily technology driven ecosystem the UX Node was hugely appreciated. The workshops and conversation ranged from the underlying system design to the technical usability and security issues around key management. Workshops were led by Iryna Nezhynska, Alex Van De Sande, The Flightplan Team (Gendry and Nas), Ronan Sandford, Matt Halthom and James Levy.

Node 5: Technical Teachings

Hosted by KI Decentralized — Eric Holst & Wilfried Kopp

This node was the epicentre of interactive coding workshops. They not only talked about Web 3, they actually started building it and made the content available through IPFS. The hot topic was ‘how to start your own Polkadot/Substrate node using docker.’ During every session, the hosts saw the number of nodes in the telemetry rise inline with the number of attendees. Mission success!

In addition, a flurry of other technical workshops tooks place. The Mist team took us through the intricacies of EIPs 1103 and 1193 and Jacques Dafflon discussed all you need to know about the ERC-777 standard.

Node 6: DApp City

hosted by Streamr — Juuso Takalainen, Eric Andrews, Miroslav Pokrovskii, Jarno Marttila, Weilei Yu & Amandine Flachs

The dApp City node was focused around theme of Smart Cities, with IoT and blockchain at its core. Topics discussed included cross-platform device identity management, the development of open vs proprietary data exchanges, protocol standards and segregation of responsibility/concern between hardware and software layers. The team at Streamr, together with Fluence and Xain, demonstrated various integrations and use cases for the Smart City 3.0 of tomorrow. They also competed for the best attended impromptu meetup against the Protocol Labs team, and won. Must have been all the free beer and goodies!

Decentralize NOW!

The Decentralize Now Node was a conference unto itself. Hosting close to 30 gatherings, this was a heroic effort by Griff Green and his team. If there was ever a moment during the entire Web3 Summit that you were looking for engaging and inspiring discussion, you would find it at this Node. They hosted loads of interactive demos, their famous ‘fishbowl’ discussions and held two late-night hackathons with bounties and beer, supported and sponsored by Gitcoin and bounties.network. Whatever we can decentralize was talked about: hardware, governance, development, data, ICOs, identity, oracles, internet access, commerce, justice, the lot! This was die hard decentralization at it’s best!

Security

From bring your own code and bug hunting tournaments to a lock picking workshop attended by around 40 people. This node won the prize for most eclectic workshop, for sure! Additionally, they hosted a crowd audit (where they audited Bokkypoobah’s red black binary tree and EIP 777) and on the last day they conducted the Solidified CTF in order to get the crowd hacking. There was active participation from BokkyPooBah, SigmaPrime, PaperSec, Solidstamp, Quantstamp and BeakerOS and many other members from all corners of the security community!

Virtual Reality

James Levy and Julia Schofield kindly provided us with a Node to relax at and reboot, it was much needed and thoroughly enjoyed by all!

Summary

Suffice it to say we were totally overwhelmed by this hive of activity that took place at Web3 Summit, all of which was entirely self-driven by the community. On reflection, it reminds us how much we can achieve, given the space and the time to focus on building out the third generation of the web. The hackerspace will definitely be back in 2019! Thank you to all the Node hosts and in particular to all the community members who made this a success!