The Pixels Camp Hackathon, reborn!
Prepare yourself for a big surprise this year. Grab a cup of tea, lay back in your favorite chair and take the time the read this in full.
Let’s talk about this year’s 48-hour programming competition, also known as the hackathon.
The goal of the Pixels Camp hackathon is to single out and reward creativity and innovation by providing participants with an opportunity to work together within a time frame of 48 hours to create something awesome.
Every candidate is strongly encouraged to put together a team and take an active part in a project — participation is what makes Pixels Camp great, and we expect everyone to get on board and push the envelope of what is possible.
The rules are simple:
- Think of a great idea;
- Put a team together;
- Develop it;
- Present it;
- Win.
So, what’s new, you might ask?
Enter Exposure
This year we decided to break with our classical approach to find the best hackathon projects based on a voting system and try something entirely new. Something that’s never been done before, and that we’re sure will be an amazing experience for everyone involved.
Based on the principles of full decentralization and transparency that blockchain technologies provide, we’ve decided to make everything about Pixels Camp, including picking up the winning projects of this year’s Hackathon, about the dynamics of a real economy — and the real world.
In order to achieve this, we created a digital coin on top of a private Ethereum network called Exposure, or EXP for short, which will be used for nearly every activity related to the Pixels Camp event and its community, including deciding which will be the winning projects in the hackathon.
Yes, we’re going blockchain, in a big way. You can read more about Exposure and how to start using our coin here. In fact, you should do this as soon as possible.
The EXP name was inspired by the famous You're doing it for the exposure cartoon from The Oatmeal:
If you don’t know The Oatmeal, then you’re a) probably living in a basement and spending too much time on cryptocurrencies or b) missing out big time. Go ahead and support Matthew Inman’s work, check out his comics and the shop.
In a nutshell, this year every participant is an entrepreneur, an investor, a service provider, a customer, a marketing guy/gal, a growth strategist, a CTO looking for help, a mentor and a trader. Read that again: entrepreneur, investor, service provider, customer, marketing, growth strategist, CTO, mentor, trader. You will be one and all at once, and being part of a team will be more than just hanging out — you’ll be running a micro-business.
Which is why this year there is no jury, just angels and investors — people who haveEXP to invest in your project, but whom you’ll have to pitch your project to in order to get… lots of exposure. Which is the only way to win. Get it?
We believe that once EXP market dynamics reach an equilibrium, the best projects will emerge naturally, thanks to their own merit and the incentives we’ve put in place — which is just like the best thrive in the real world, right?
Ok, and how I do I earn EXPs? Great question.
Earning EXPs
The simplest way to earn EXPs, is by collecting badges.
Each badge equals 100 EXPs in the participant's account, but some badges are worth more (e.g., the quiz show winners).
You can transfer or accumulate EXPs to and from other users, smart contracts or projects.
Keep an eye out on Twitter, too, and tweet about the event. That’s another form of exposure, right?
There is a special scavenger hunt in place that once solved, will make someone rich. ~50,000 EXPs rich. You’re going to love it but this is as much clues as you’ll get from us.
And finally, you can buy or sell services using the marketplace.
Wait, there’s a marketplace?
The Marketplace
The Pixels Camp open market is a way for participants to sell or buy services during the event using the EXP tokens in their balances.
Anyone can apply to sell a service, and anyone can buy services from others.
You can purchase a service to get help for your team, for example requesting time from a web designer, or get access to an exceptional mentor, or to advertise your project. The sky (and your imagination) is the limit.
The reasoning behind this is that you will spend and earn EXPs to increase your chances of winning the hackathon, either because you need the service because you'd get a better project, or because you need the money to invest in it.
Here’s more information on how to use the marketplace — we can’t wait to see what you’ll be selling there.
Liquidity, incentives and equilibrium
For the market to work and have liquidity, one must be very careful with the incentives in place. We thought about this for a while and even made a few simulations, but to be honest there’s a good chance this will go… 💩
There’s no dangerous place like a hackathon packed with top technology wizards to deconstruct a model you thought would work… on paper.
You can find the full list of rules and incentives, including how the winning projects are calculated at the end here.
Registering your Project
The hackathon projects are now managed in the main Pixels Camp website. To register a new project for your team, log into your account, and click the top right drop-down menu to create your new project.
The whole system deliberately tries to imitate Kickstarter. You can think of your project page as a campaign because that’s precisely what you’ll be doing during the 48-hour hackathon: campaigning for your project to win and trying to accumulate as much EXPs as possible.
Just like Kickstarter, and to promote the public projects as soon as they are enabled, we have public listings too.
You can find full instructions on how to create and manage your project and team, as well as more information about the rules of the hackathon in this page.
Prizes
Pixels Camp will award the ten best funded projects.
Each of the winning projects will receive a handful of prizes (some offered by our sponsors and partners), and a big beautiful Pixels Camp 2017 trophy to proudly display by the fireplace at home for life — or until you win another next year.
Awesome indeed, I’m sold. I want EXPs now and I can’t wait. Where do I start?
Start reading NOW
We understand that taking all of this in can be overwhelming if you’re not familiar with digital crypto-currency, but trust us — it’s actually not that hard once you get started.
To make it easier for you, we wrote a bunch of documentation and built some tools to make your incursion into Exposure and the Pixels Camp market a breeze:
- What is Exposure and how does it work;
- How to create your first wallet to receive
EXPs; - How to work with the marketplace;
- What are the incentives and how are the winning projects decided;
- The rules of the 48-hour hackathon;
- How to register a project;
- How to take notes of the projects you like, to invest later;
- What’s the schedule.
Once you’re ready to start, one of the tools you’ll be using the most is the Pixels Camp Wallet. But please, RTFM first.
Furthermore, one of the first sessions in the calendar will be a full talk on Exposure and the new rules, in the Segfault stage, at 2 PM, with Q&A included.
For those who will be unable to attend, we’ll make sure to make the video available online as soon as possible.
You can also find us on the Pixels Camp Slack and ask us questions in the #hackathon or #blockchain channels.
That’s it!
We hope you will enjoy this experiment as much as we enjoyed building it for you. As a bonus, you get to learn a lot about blockchain, market dynamics, and game theory.
And by the way: in the end, all the data is yours. We’ll provide a full dump of the blockchain for you to explore and learn even more, and maybe find interesting patterns and statistics to share and give back to the community.
Now you know the reason why “To the moon” is our motto this year.
Start your engines, folks — To the moon!
