Free-vzla x Swarm

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About page
How data is stored, thanks to Swarm

Prizes

Winner of Best use of Swarm for protecting freedom of information

Wallet: 0xC045E928d24Ba4A1f93B75150d5eFF576ca0c432

Inspiration

Due to censorship from Venezuelan dictatorship, people can not express freely on the web and inform the world about what's happening in their beloved country, social media like Twitter and Facebook censor stuff that they feel could be controversial or polemical regarding the country decisions.

What it does

It's a place to create posts which can be accessed through an intuitive user interface, read, gain knowledge about Venezuela and if you can, contribute to the page from your own experiences, or things that you heard from close Venezuelan friends or family.

How we built it

A front-end built in next's and typescript, pure css that consumes services implemented in a backend with Swarm, Sqlite, NodeJS and Express. It was build with love and lots of coffee and energy drinks <3

Challenges we ran into

Swarm, as it was our first experience with presencial hackathons, web3 and open source, getting in track was hard. After one team member proposed the idea that was close to Swarm's philosophy, we decided to contribute to the world in a social manner with digital freedom for a country that has not enjoyed this. Thus, we had to ask, investigate, try, fail and succeed, join communities, spend hours coding and getting 8 hours of sleep between two days, that's the hackathon mood, right?

Accomplishments that we're proud of

An intuitive UI build from the ground up that changes to dark or light mode based on system preferences, a lightweight and quick backend and distributed storage in the World's Hard drive, Swarm. As newcomers to the web3 world and open source, learning and approaching this kind of technology really made us proud, the satisfaction of creating something with a social impact, being censorship-resistant will help the Venezuelan people to share their story.

What we learned

About digital freedom, something that we 'have' but that we don't value as much as we should, people without a platform can't share their stories, thus, the world won't know how is it really where they are. Working under pressure and team work were key items too, delegating tasks and optimizing our time was important as well.

What's next for Free-vzla x Swarm

Maybe two dashboards, one where posts are free of any filters, and one where posts need to be reviewed by the same community, some moderator, to determine if they are ok to go live, something like 4chan does.