Motivation
Only few students participate in university politics, often because of the high perceived difficulty and high time investment. This means that many don't express their voice, even though it's detrimental to themselves. In addition, participation in surveys and votes is often of high value for the institutions involved. Unfortunately, only few people participate in them, often because they don't feel like their voice has any weight in any meaningful decisions. We want to provide a blockchain-based solution that provides students the confidence that their vote matters by making them able to inspect and validate the voting process. We hope that this might incentivize more students to take part in these important surveys and polls. This allows students a low barrier to entry to university politics and allows representatives access to accurate, tamper-proof and precise data.
Gained Knowledge
It was interesting to see how vastly different (and difficult) the workflow for seemingly familiar trivial problems can be when applying them in a different context (blockchain vs. traditional web server). We learned to be more modest with our scope during hackathons. But more importantly, we learned a ton about blockchains and identity, despite only being able to implement a fraction of the things we learned.
Challenges
Most of the challenges we encountered were technical. Unfortunately, many of us had problems getting a proper environment setup running and sometimes struggles with vaguely-understood concepts of a new subject. It's easy to overestimate what is possible in a such short time and it was a bit demotivating seeing realizing that we won't have enough time to do things properly anymore. But still, we enjoyed suffering together with other groups and really appreciated the insight of the tutors.
Outlook
Despite the disappointing outcome, we still see the value and importance behind the idea. Originally we even anticipated integrating self-sovereign identities to increase the feeling of being in control. We believe that a lot can be done in the future and hope that we can have a chance to give things a proper go again soon. As for us, we are looking forward to the next hackathon and are sure we are going to do much better the next time, after gaining all this knowledge and increased tenacity.
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