Launching The Architect Project at ETHDenver
What do you do after placing amongst the top 15 hacks at the largest blockchain hackathon in the world? Keep hacking.
tl;dr: I worked on integrating the Ethereum blockchain into The Architect Project @ ETHDenver. Although we won, there is much work left to do. Check us out.
I am a maker. At the core of my being lies the inherent need to spend countless hours crafting projects for the world. Writing could be considered one such vehicle for making, but I am new to the form of communication (that is not to say I have not been writing all my life, but to have my writing be on display in a public forum is another behemoth to tackle). As such, I find the act of writing abrasive and somewhat tedious, but hope to learn to appreciate the art form as I write more. This general discomfort, coupled with my want to further The Architect Project to a point where I am proud to have my name labeled on it, leads me to be hesitant to share this retrospective with the world.
But that would be foolish.
The nature of The Architect Project makes it important to value public discussion. This is a retrospective, yes, and there will be a recounting of ETHDenver somewhere, but it is important to me that The Architect project receive a proper introduction to the world as I plan to dedicate some of my time over the next few months working on it. Since I strongly believe that the development of The Architect project should align with the morals it is trying to instill through its creation, I am publicizing this project now.
Architect, an easy-to-use platform for self-governance.
We see a system that communities can easily leverage to decentralize their decision making and come to unbiased results in an effective way. Our vision for this system is, however, unorthodox. The governance system on which Architect rests is similar to that of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). At its core, Architect revolves around Proposals. These proposals are solutions to issues that the overarching community is facing, and are grouped categorically by the broad topics they address. Any person or group of persons can submit a proposal which can be viewed publicly given that x percentage of the community agrees to view the proposal.
Proposals undergo a period of community discussion and amendments, at the end of which a voting process is instated. The value of a person’s vote is measured proportionally to the amount of impact that the proposal has on them. The weight of a vote on a proposal can also factor in the amount that the voter has contributed to: the topic in which that proposal has been categorized, the overarching community that is considering the proposal, or the discussion or creation of said proposal.
Architecting a New Future
Imagine that you have moved back to the hometown where you grew up, but now live with your spouse and two children. The community is leveraging the Architect project to build a better school system for those who live within it. All of those who fall within the school district can use the platform to contribute to the school’s development, but those with children in the school district, much like yourself, have a greater say on what changes are implemented.
Consider, for a moment, that the school is using an outdated curriculum for their science courses. You, a biologist with a better understanding of what is relevant to the industry right now than a teacher with outdated training, can create a proposal to implement changes to the school’s biology curriculum that makes it more relevant.
The community can evaluate your changes. Perhaps your friends from the weekly Biology Club at the bar have some different ideas about what should be taught. They can discuss their opinions in a forum that the entire community can see. After a consensus is made through this discussion, the community votes on the proposal. Your vote is weighted differently from that of your neighbor, who is a mechanic with no kids, as a result of being more directly involved in the proposal’s creation and being more impacted by its instating.
“Your vote is weighted differently from that of your neighbor…as a result of being more directly involved in the proposal’s creation and being more impacted by its instating.”
It was this edge case that attracted my friends Willie, TJ, and Briant to the project. Two weeks ago, on February 18, we built the conceptual version of Architect at ETHDenver, a hackathon in Denver, Colorado. I had not expected that I would be attending the event, nor had I ever expected to be hacking alongside my friends, who had just a month prior not known about the power of Ethereum.
However, the idea for Architect originally budded from a conference that I attended a year prior.
Blueprints
The idea for Architect first occurred to me after a New Jersey mock legislation conference, not too long after I had first joined the Blockchain industry. My initial vision for Architect was far from what it has grown into now. Originally, I had not thought beyond adding more collaboration to the proposal creation process. I also had conceptualized a rudimentary form of weighted voting that could have easily been rigged by an ill-mannered member. It took months of iterating and a well-constructed, 6-hour brainstorming session (fueled by Bing Crips) to bring Architect to its current form.
In hindsight, ETHDenver was a great platform for validating the Architect Project. What better way to prove that a concept is worthy than to present it to ~300 people from its intended audience (hackers). We received a lot of feedback and helpful suggestions from the community at the event, for which I am very thankful.
After our mini-brainstorming session at ETHDenver we drove straight into implementing the project. TJ and Willie created a chatbot, Archie, to onboard hackers into the Architect system created for ETHDenver. Using OpenCV, the bot was able to process the QR code on the back of the physical tokens (provided by the event to all hackers).
After onboarding users, Archie used NLP (built by TJ using NLTK) to parse user input. Willie then added functionality to display proposals by category or relevance to the user. I built the backend for data storage and communication with the protocols built by DAOStack, and designed the frontend. Archie leveraged the backend server to create users and display proposals grouped by categories. Briant built the landing page for the project.
Just prior to pitching I broke a vital part of our tech. We had barely completed a portion for our overall vision for the project. One of the sponsors seemed displeased that we had showed them a separate codebase during our pitch that we intended to integrate into the core project after the event. Despite this, our pitch went smoothly.
I was ecstatic when, after pitching to judges, the DAOStack team sat with us and discussed how we could take the project further. The conversation birthed a lot of great potential use cases for the Architect project. For me, that was remarkable. The rest of my team had not had much experience with the blockchain industry and relied on me to provide a basis for our project. To have my concept validated by industry professionals was a great feeling, as was the ability to give my teammates a memorable first experience.
Winning
I did not expect that our project would receive any recognition from judges (we won top 15 and a sponsor prize), much less support from the community. I am grateful for winning, but to me, the experience of building the conceptual version of Architect was worth a lot more. The allure of cash prizes lost their effect once I discovered the true underlying value of understanding technology. I also was very grateful to have a shared space with hackers who were as passionate as I about building impactful projects,
The enthusiastic feedback from judges, volunteers, and other attendees has motivated me to continue working on Architect past the confines of the 36-hour event. This amount of support is somewhat daunting (I’ll say it — why would you trust an 18-year-old) but has solidified my belief that the Architect project can have a profound impact.
Learning
The project itself was completed in less than 30 hours. I enjoyed working with the team, and it was really interesting to work with the DAOStack library, Arc.js, as it enabled me to leverage existing smart contracts entirely through Javascript. This ease of use enabled us to focus more on developing a solid idea at the start of the event, and we were able to hash it out further through the whitepaper we wrote (very much a rough draft).
Through the workshops, I learned how to implement Storj and 0x into applications I plan on building. I was able to leverage the Storj API to create a simple decentralized storage system, but was unable to fit it into the final hackathon demo because I broke it. Horribly.
Perhaps the most insightful workshop that I attended was David Knott’s Introduction to Vyper. Vyper is a language for smart contract development that focuses on readability (as opposed to writability, like Solidity) with a big emphasis on security. This project piqued my interest further after I read more about the design decisions made when constructing it. I recently joined the Vyper room in the Ethereum Gitter and hope to contribute to the project in the coming weeks (open source 🤘).
I’ll be sharing updates to Vyper on my social media, if you’d like to keep up to date with what we’re working on follow me:
Hackathons and ETHDenver
I have been an avid supporter and a contributing member of the hackathon community since my first event in 2013. I was so inspired that I went on to organize over 100 hackathons and similar tech events across the globe.
When I first started hacking, hackathons were a space for showcasing technical marvels. Innovation was plentiful. Hackers were not afraid to work on projects that were admirable purely because of their technicality because thousands of dollars were not on the line. The tight-knit community was full of people who were passionate about writing code. Sometime after, corporate sponsorship began to find its way into hackathons, and the purists, like myself, were worried.
We were worried that involving huge corporations would dilute the spirit of hackathons. We were worried that our safe-haven would be flooded with money-hungry fiends whose projects did little more than corporate pandering.
We were right to be worried.
Projects at hackathons generally tend to be API mashups, traps that look to snag the endless barrage of non-technical recruiters that sponsors pour into these events. Most hackathons projects are aesthetically pleasing, just as most are functionally lacking. Products have become the supreme end result of hackathons, not projects.
“These events have turned into another buzzword marketing affair to be leveraged by a growth hacker at x startup or marketing director at y company to push the company’s agenda for that quarter.”
Technical prowess is undervalued, even lost.There is little value given to authentic technical skill — in fact, most judges of hackathons are non-technical. Hackathons tend to value judges simply because of the weight their names’ carry. These events have turned into another buzzword marketing affair to be leveraged by a growth hacker at x startup or marketing director at y company to push the company’s agenda for that quarter.
Suprisingly, this was not the case with ETHDenver.
Yes, the event was extravagant, but the impact that sponsors had were filtered. The focus was on the hacker experience. Not only that, the organizers understood that a blockchain hackathon can and should be different from a normal hackathon, and implemented those changes. The judging criteria reflected as much, there were categories during the judging process that focused on areas past technical implementation — vital for blockchain projects because it is not feasible to try and build an entire dApp in 36 hours.
The message that I am trying to deliver is not meant to be specific in what the organizers did, rather, how they did it. The approach that the ETHDenver team took to build their event should be considered more by hackathon organizers. Evident through the quality and logistics of the event, the team took steps to measure their audience and gauged what changes should be made to cater to their hackers. That is, perhaps, the most valuable thing organizers can do for their attendees.
Laying a Foundation
In the coming weeks I will work on defining a clearer and more specific vision for the Architect project, and will build the foundation for the project with a core team of developers. This is somewhat ironic, the nature of the Architect project is that of grassroots collaboration. As such, this development approach is somewhat contrary to the mission of Architect, but I believe that it would be counter-productive to allow general contribution without some structure in-place. Perhaps it would be ideal to allow collaboration from the inception of the project, but I am too inexperienced in managing open-source communities, and would not be able to handle such a task. Ultimately the inception of Architect was a vision that I had which leads me to feel responsible for its development.
“…the nature of the Architect project is that of grassroots collaboration.”
The core development team will build the baseline technology for the Architect , as well as a structure for contributing, before opening the project up to public contribution. The entire planning and development process will be open-source, and soon enough the core team will have a system in place to build Architect with a public forum for input from any person interested in contributing to the early-stages of the project. Architect will not begin without this system in place. In my opinion, this solves the problem of haphazard contribution but maintains Architects core values.
Remodeling
In its current form, I do not see Architect as a valuable iteration on the concept of a DAO. I feel that it does not tangibly augment the technology it leverages. I see this as a side-effect of the broad scope of Architect’s vision, which is why the project was more effectively implemented when we applied the concept to the ETHDenver, where the hackathon was the community. Providing a more specific scope for the project would enable us to quantify measurable factors to track within communities, as otherwise there are too many edge cases to consider. This would enable us to work on a more valuable project as Architect would be a genuine iteration of what has already been produced by the blockchain community. As such, I propose narrowing down the communities that Architect tackles aligns with the example I mentioned earlier: schools.
Going Further, Shaping Society
Something I have considered a lot while thinking of this project is the thematic significance of its name. The impact that Architects have had on our society is measurable in millennia, a good Architect’s work stands tall long beyond their time. In doing Architects have had the ability to shape society itself, our cultures have grown around the buildings that Architects leave behind. It is this nurturing ability that Architects have that leaves me in such profound awe of their work. It also highlights the value and impact of the work of Architects.
I wished to impart this same ideology when naming this project Architect. I wanted to build a tool that would enable impact and societal modeling. It is precisely this that leads to believe that the education system, the literal embodiment of shaping the future, would be a great place for Architect to focus its impact.
That, however, is up for discussion. Architect is a public platform — where do you think we should go next? Should the project narrow its scope? Should we use a specific technology, API, or paradigm? Please leave any and all thoughts that you have. Let’s be the Architects of our future.
Thanks for reading — follow me to stay up to date with progress on Architect.
About the Author
I’m Rohan Mishra, an “Empowerer,” Full-stack Hacker, and Blockchain Devevangelist. Currently: San Francisco, Lead Software Engineer @ Make School. Prev: Director of Hackathons @ The BEN Team, East Coast Regional Manager @ StudentRND.
