Gitcoin Founded OpenData Community kicks off DataBuilder Hackathon

epowell101 · January 4, 2023, 3:52pm

DataBuilder Hackathon: FIght Sybils, Decentralize Data

Organized by the fast-growing OpenData Community, and sponsored by several leading DAOs and web3 organizations, the hackathon offers contestants $40,000 in bounties. The hackathon kicks off on January 5th and runs until January 31st.

Contestants will compete - and collaborate - to find insightful anti-Sybil algorithms and to package anti-Sybil algorithms into composable legos. Contestants that use decentralized technologies including those highlighted on the OpenData Community landscape will be preferred. Bounties are also available for contributions to FAQs and other materials.

Interested competitors can learn more and register here:
https://gitcoin.co/hackathon/DataBuilders/onboard

Community members and judges will be discussing the hackathon on a Twitter Space on January 5th: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1yoJMZLPdZXxQ

Protecting Public Goods Funding and Data Decentralization

DataBuilders contestants will be provided with data from the recent Unicef / Gitcoin and Fantom / Gitcoin public goods funding rounds. Gitcoin helped to found the OpenData Community in part to ensure that as Gitcoin decentralizes - it also decentralizes its expertise in defending public goods funding from Sybil attacks. More about the founding of the OpenData Community is available in this November 2022 Forum post: https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/gitcoin-starts-and-supports-the-opendata-community/11886

Many organizations are coming together to organize, promote, and fund the DataBuilders hackathon. In addition to Gitcoin and the FDD, Ocean Protocol, Pocket Network, Supermodular, TrueBlocks, and a former OpenData Community hackathon winner, TrustaLabs, are sponsors and contributors to the hackathon. TrustaLabs has contributed back the bounties it won in the inaugural OpenData Hackathon.

The DataBuilders hackathon winners will be announced in early February. Again, contestants can register and learn more about the hackathon at: https://gitcoin.co/hackathon/DataBuilders/onboard

OpenData Community:

The mission of the OpenData Community is to defend web3 from the related risks of Sybil attacks and centralization at the data layer. Current initiatives of the ODC include a Landscape of decentralized solutions including TrueBlocks and others, AMAs with project creators, how-to videos and FAQs, and hackathons such as the current DataBuilders hackathon. The ODC was founded in 2022 by Gitcoin and benefits tremendously from the expertise of Gitcoin data scientists and the support of the Gitcoin DAO and Gitcoin community. http://opendatacommunity.org/

epowell101 · January 12, 2023, 3:59pm

One week into the DataBuilders hackathon and the status is positive. We have a lot of interest as this chart indicates. We have had dozens of downloads of the data sets as well and see 133 individuals have shown interest on the Gitcoin / Supermodular hackathon site we are using.

This chart also indicates that so far we have not seen much of that hackathon interest translate into help in building the OpenData Community itself - even though we have a bounty to reward that behavior. There could be a lag - and we are seeing an increase in the rate of requests for write access to our Github, which is promising. It could also be that we are not yet attracting many community builders and that most potential hackathon participants are attracted by the data analysis and lego and dashboard building.

Please feel free to drop into the ODC discord at any time to look around yourself! I am more convinced than ever that both the focus at the ODC on Sybil identification and related data science and software development AND the emphasis on decentralization at the data layer are strategically important to our shared intents and overall mission at Gitcoin. We need to protect and grow our commons - allowing potential capture at the data layer, and of course hijacking of pluralism by Sybils - simply cannot be allowed.