I was proud to be a sponsor, trainer and mentor at the Smart Cities Blockchain Hackathon http://smartcitieshack.org/

SmartCitiesHack Melbourne brings together the brightest minds to develop innovative solutions, utilising IOT, Blockchain and Big Data to introduce smart technology to solve real world problems, in one of Australia's largest cities.

An impressive aspect of the hack is that there were 2 teams from a girls high school, one from a college, and one solo university student. It was great to see younger people getting involved and solving problems from their own unique perspective.

The final demos that interested me the most were:

  • Home stay invest
  • Public works platchain
  • Smart space

And of course there was lots and lots of food sponsored by Microsoft
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Kick off

A few guest speakers presented at the beginning of the day to help give insights into what type of challenges cities are facing. One of them was the CIO of the city of Palo Alto

Cities of the future need to focus on 3 key things: Liveability, workability & sustainability.

6% of Australia's GDP goes through Melbourne
How do you prepare a city for autonomous vehicles.
Digital identity. Who owns it, who can use it.
How can gov policy keep up (some industries will be dead before legislation even comes in)

We have such a massive influx of people moving into the cities. If we think traffic congestion is bad now, wait until the future!
Thinks the issue is climate change trumps any other issue.
Users don't want to deal with governments in giant waiting queues at centrelink. They want to just pull out a smartphone app and renew their license.

Winners

  • 3rd place. My Say
  • 2nd place. Owl
  • 1st place. Smart space

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The presentations

Smart space
Decentralised way to list rentable spaces e.g. conference rooms, lecture theatres.
Can book it using blockchain, get a QR code, can enter the room.

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Team peak
High school student team
Medical insurance fund
Do it peer to per so that you can reduce costs by removing the massive admin overhead costs of existing insurers.
Have people in community randomly validate claim requests.

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Ourspace
Property storage rental.
More and more people are moving into cities, people have less living space. People are looking for storage spaces. Allows people who have spare space to rent it out to others
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Smart carbon
Solo 2nd year university student.
Tracking carbon emissions from sensors, and keeping a true record on the blockchain. Built a blockchain solution that would allow sensors to store their data. Allows trusted collection of carbon emissions in real time.
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Public works platchain
Try and reduce costs and provide better cost certainty through public works tenders.
Tenders and implementations rely on multiple parties (council, telstra, contractor). At the moment parties can delay without incentive to complete on time.
Can use blockchain as an escrow account for payments, and other stakeholders put in a deposit. If the contractor delays, they automatically get a penalty fee taken out of the escrow account. If the stakeholders (council or telstra) are the cause of the delay, they lose a portion of their deposit.
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Team Quatr
Tracking home rubbish bin levels, so that garbage collection trucks don't need to stop at every home, and can be more efficient. Automatic optimised route creation.
People that recycle get 1 "eco token" per recycle bin collected.
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Home stay invest
For international students looking for long term housing. And for Australian's looking to purchase an investment home.
Allows people to invest in their communities and their schools.
Multiple actors, students, people that want to invest, people who have spare rooms to rent.
Fractional property purchase / fractional sale.

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Team Owl
https://owl.now.sh/
Sensors can create streams of data, that they can sell for tokens.
Others can see on a map the list of streams, can click to purchase access rights to the sensor data stream.
Iota IoT network
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Team Mysay
Girls high school team
Electronic voting via the Blockchain. Allow more open democracy. Can use for local council meetings for example
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