Inspiration
The inspiration for Blockchange came from the large increase in usage that I've seen of the platform Change.org since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis. Many Change.org petitions have been created to get colleges to convert to pass fail grading, large organizations to give back massive loans intended for small businesses, and much more. I realized, however, that Change.org has put itself into a place of a lot of power by centralizing all these data on the people that are completing these petitions. I had never worked with blockchain before but I began to wonder if there would be some kind of way to decentralize all of these people who were creating and completing these petitions work into a public ledger that would be easily accessible by anyone that fills them out (which is how it really ought to be). Thus, Blockchange was born.
What it does
Blockchange allows people to create petitions and sign petitions that they believe in much the same as Change.org. The way it differs is that these petitions and the people that create / sign them are stored in a blockchain. The use of blockchain over a centralized database allows for a great increase in transparency. Blockchain is ideal for voting systems like this since it has a high fault tolerance and the fact that everyone has a copy of the public ledger is ideal for a petition that people will be signing.
How I built it
I used Truffle and the Solidity programming language to interact with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. This allowed me to build the smart contracts for interacting with the blockchain. I then deployed to a personal Ethereum Blockchain using Ganache. The frontend of the application is written in React. I also used Canva / Figma for designs and for making the logo.
Challenges I ran into
I had never worked with blockchain technologies at all before this project and had only started learning about what the blockchain is, its advantages, etc. about a week prior when I got the idea for this project. This steep learning curve coupled with the 24 hour time limit made it very difficult.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I feel like I gained a grasp of a completely new technology and learned so much in a short amount of time. I also was solo on this project and that definitely made it hard for me to stay committed since I didn't have the encouragement and collaboration of teammates but to spite this I still managed to create something that I am proud of in the 24 hour time span.
What I learned
I learned an immense amount about blockchain, blockchain technologies, and definitely improved my time management abilities as since I was working alone the work had to be planned out carefully.
What's next for Blockchange
I would love to look deeper into how this could actually be applied further. For the purposes of this hackathon this was deployed to a personal Ethereum Blockchain using Ganache but I would love to see what steps could be taken to make this a deployed alternative to change.org.
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