**Ethereum Magicians - Remote Hackathon**

### A. General information
| | |
| -------- | -------- |
| Session title | Remote Hackathon |
| Facilitator | Aidan |
| Scribe | Chris Hobcroft |
| Time and date | 16:00 - 17:30, 29.10.2018. |
| Material requirements | *Brain*, *Mouth* |
| Space requirements | *Text* |
| Number of participants | *12* |

### B. Expected outcomes

The group has shared ideas about pros / cons of organising remote / distributed hackathons.

Engage existing members of the community, as well as connecting into new communities outside our echo-chamber.

The group has captured next steps for how to prototype a remote / distributed hackathon.

### C. Expected outputs

To create / evolve a template re: rules submissions regarding participation in events.

To organise 2 meetups / events in the next 2 months, somewhere in the world, to understand more about what the communities need in each of these places.

Objective to inspire people to build some stuff.

## Intro

Boris / Aiden discussed previously - to aim to create a tangible template for reinvigorate our local communities - as some kind of valuable output of tangible energy back into our own local communities.

n.b. this isn't about creating hyper-locality, more about decentralised distributed activities coordinated around a common set of goals.

## Notes

Question: what's the objective? e.g. getting new people into the space, or e.g. arranging hackathons around EIPs.
Answer: can be either.

Funding: how could this be funded? Grants from Ethereum Foundation? Potential for creating a DAO to manage the funding for this. Also, allow for localised sponsorship, aligned with objectives.

Interest in how to connect into localised creative communities, outside the Blockchain space, which already have space / funding / shared community values - and seek to support these communities (example in Reno, Berlin).

Aim to balance the focus of bringing a "hackathon" ethos to building (fun, experimental), with real-life use-cases to support communities.

Important to create some kind of vision, but also leave space for less "planned" activities or objectives - i.e. accepting that we don't know all the answers yet.

Spreading the teaching of the information about what tools exist in our community, and empower / enable others to build.

*HackEtherCamp* did a good job of making it broad and open. Team connection was done based on a set of usernames coming together. *HackEtherCamp* was partnering / integrating with Cloud Nine to enable a virtual hackathon, providing visibility of what other people are live coding, allowing collaboration / paired programming across the world. This partnership created *Ethereum Studio* = Ethereum-flavoured Cloud Nine. A blocker exists now that Cloud Nine is not open-sourcing their code.

New tools are emerging to allow people to livestream their coding, to allow others to see what is happening.

Risks with remote hackathons are that with a typical hackathon there are incentives to participate / compete. With a remote one, this has less potential to be able to effectively engage people.

In order to convince someone to go to a localised hackathon, there needs to be some kind of incentive. However, connection to e.g. ETH Magicians, can potentially help to bring some "big speakers" to attract hackers. The travel / accommodation costs for "big speakers" might end up being the only funding needed.

Another thing to draw in hackers is to encourage participation from project already building in this space, in order to provide skilled resources to help hackers when they get stuck etc.

Food is something which can connect people, bring people together, on a localised basis, and also on a decentralised basis.

Another way to get people engaged on a local level is to target localised problems, e.g. the state of Nevada has legalised weed and legalised prostitution, so tailoring the subject matter of the hackathon to the local business / group / community can have better chance to engage people locally.

It's worth being cognizant that as a community, we are all working on scaling solutions, and things seems to be moving - but can we focus on how we will use these new tools to build stuff that matters, and build stuff that these people will use.

One example cited from a hackathon was to experiment with the judging process - making it less technical - e.g. include indiginous people - i.e. to incentivise building for non-technical communities.

An intention of this initiative could also be about learning the skills needed to build stuff, and then e.g. to go on gitcoin / bounties, so that they can actually make an effect.

An example cited was of a London-based hackathon - where the hackathon was primarily technical, but the judges were not technical, and ended up giving prizes to highly-aspirational projects which had serious technical flaws ("impossible").

A valuable repository would be a list of localized problems that people felt needed solved locally, and then aim to build systems which might solve more of these.

## Places to learn more

[Hack Summit](https://hacksummit.org/) is an example of an annually-occurring distributed remote hackathon.

[livepeer](https://livepeer.org) is an open-source video infrastructure services which is perfectly-positioned to allow hackers to livestream their hacking

[She Hacks](https://shehacks.com/) as a great example of encouraging diversity into the tech space - to inspire the inclusion of more people into this space - accessibility to everyone.

Coding Game - remote / distributed 1-month-long competitions for hacking on new ideas - which is great if you're a student, but if you're working, it's not so easy to be able to commit this kind of time.

[Pioneer](http://pioneer.app/) is "a home for the ambitious outsiders of the world". They are "building a community of creative young people working on interesting projects around the globe."

## Actions

- [ ] Create template / proposal for how a 2-month plan can work to organise remote hackathon
- [ ] Organise a Remote Hackathon / Hack Day / Hack Night(s)
- [ ] Take this idea back to your communities - IT'S UP TO YOU TO START TO BUILD THE MOVEMENT

## Media

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