Socis Hunt

Blockchain-based solidarity reward solution motivating ongoing social responsibilty

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Inspiration

In this unprecedented time, world-wide initiatives have been launched to face the immediate challenges that Covid-19 has brought upon us. At the same time every challenge holds an opportunity. We want to channel and preserve the good behaviour that emerges from the unusual situation we find ourselves in right now. Let’s move into our future stronger, more conscious, more inclusive, more grateful, more European!

What it does

Governmental and non-governmental organisations, initiatives and companies face a lack of opportunity to compare and measure individuals' engagement and to provide suitable recognition and reward mechanisms in times of challenging crises like Covid-19, but also beyond. Systems oftentimes do not possess the capability of continuously fostering desired social behaviour. We offer above-mentioned target users a way to recognise and reward ongoing solidary behaviour by providing a flexible and motivating recognition and reward system, so called Socis Hunts, to be applied to any kind of societal challenge.

Everyone has the opportunity to set up Socis Hunts, either public or private ones. A Socis Hunt can consist of different levels, each containing different tasks, for example grocery shopping or cycling to work. By fulfilling these tasks contributors earn Socis (points) and steadily reach higher ranks from Enthusiast to Epic Angel. For extraordinary achievements, contributors can be awarded badges to share with their networks on social media as well as include them as certificates in CVs and applications.

Both, in the application and on the NextNow website, leaderboards show the achievements of individuals, initiatives and other organisations that have organised public or private Socis Hunts.

How we built it

We have created a web application for participants to consult their profile and browse hunts, and for initiatives to submit their hunts to the NextNow platform.

We have also created a backend server providing APIs for all the needs of the NextNow platforms and any future users/integrators.

As for the blockchain part, we have chosen the Ethereum blockchain where we have deployed our main Socis Smart Contract. This contract follows the ERC20 standard to create our Soci (social impact token), making it usable across all Ethereum wallets and clients, it is also the centerpiece of the NextNow platform.

Upon hunt submission, the API will first validate all the info provided (rules of the hunt, tasks, point rewarding, etc…), and then forward the request to our Socis smart contract which in turn will deploy a new smart contract that will serve as the “hunt engine”. If the hunt includes rewarding badges as well as points, an extra contract will be deployed implementing ERC721 standards.

Participants will interact with the “hunt engine” smart contract which will manage their progress and their rewards. Tokens can only be granted using the Socis contract, which only accepts rewarding orders from the deployed “hunt engine” contracts. This architecture coupled with the properties of blockchain ensures the integrity and transparency of the NextNow platform.

Technologies used:

Frontend: ReactJS, Material-UI; Backend: NodeJs, Express, Sequelize; Blockchain: truffle suite, Solidity, Ethereum Virtual Machine assembly for advanced edge use cases

Infrastructure used:

We have used AWS cloud services to guarantee optimal availability of our provided services: EC2 for backend servers, S3 coupled with cloudfront for website hosting and content delivery networks, RDS with data level encryption for GDPR compliance, CloudWatch for system logging and monitoring

Challenges we ran into

Although we are an amazing team with even more amazing backend developers, things would have been easier with a front end developer.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Three weeks ago, we as a team, met each other for the very first time. We developed a vision to make the world a better place together. Since then, we’ve managed to develop the structure of the NextNow platform further and further, including the build of the NextNow website. In order to showcase the strength of our solution we have developed three Socis Hunts as use cases from frontend and user backend perspective.

It was a great collaboration within the team. We were lucky to discover a great mix of talents in this group. Starting with a Mural board, we quickly realised that we need a technological prototype as well as a very good presentation. Our NextNow approach is rather complex than trivial. We managed to create a website, a compelling presentation, and even have the program running with a frontend and examples of smart contracts in the backend.

We have entered #versusvirus as first hackathon and found something we could not even dream of. We met likeminded and extraordinary talented people that complement each other in a way we have not experienced before. We loved working together and continued by entering #togethervsvirus that honored us with 4th place. We are proud to work now on a third iteration in #euvsvirus. We feel blessed being on this journey together! To be continued…

We are proud that Socis Hunt:

  1. promotes peace, its values and the well-being of its citizens

  2. combats social exclusion and discrimination

  3. promotes scientific and technological progress

  4. enhances economic, social and territorial cohesion and solidarity among EU countries

and does therefore supports the European Union to achieve their ambitions and goals. The holistic concept can be extended to any other upcoming crisis in the future.

What we learned

Thankfully, we are all life-long learners! From frontend, via website design, to video production, we’ve learned a lot this weekend. Based on previous hackathon experience we’ve decided to start with a smaller, but fully committed team. This led us to be more focused and productive throughout the weekend.

What's next for Socis Hunt

We intend to finalize the MVP and conclude our first Socis Hunt. To achieve this ambition we require the support of one or two professional Game Developers. This is the skill set we are currently lacking. Using the existing blockchain-based NextNow platform, wallet, and MVP, we build an exemplary SOCIs Hunt as relevant use case to launch our offering, promote our solution and drive our differentiation in the market. We aim at building our first Hunt within the next 3 months with the help of a professional game developer. Furthermore, we will continue validating our use cases by running user tests, competitor and SWOT analyses. In addition, we will prepare and start go-to-market activities to kick-start the NextNow social responsibility movement.

Our vision for us and the EU is that every organization and every individual that uses NextNow and plays successfully Socis Hunts will be recognized as “socially responsible”. Therefore becoming a role model and ultimately an ambassador for the NextNow movement, representing the best the EU can offer to drive social impact.

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