Request from community to hubs

Community
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To all at ICP Hubs

First off congrats to the for the livestream you ran yesterday during the World Computer Summit.

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The fact that for a big chunk of the day you were the only stream out there meant that there are now a lot more people in the community who are aware of who you are and what you do.

On that note, I know a lot of you are either in the midst of running or about to start Hackathons.

It would be really interesting for the community (especially considering these boards were originally set up for developers) to know more about the applicants, their backgrounds and the projects they create.

Some of you have posted the results of your hackathons on twitter in the past, but it would be awesome to know how those teams are getting on 6 months or a year down the line.

Specifically this is a shout out to

Argentina
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Argentina - @stollmar

Latest hackathon ended 2nd June, tell us how it went?

Hub_Group
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Bulgaria, Belgium, Poland, Portugal, Germany, France & Ukraine - @tiago89

Tell us about April’s hackathon

kenya
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Kenya

You have a hackathon in July, we want to know all about it!

There are probably more that I have missed. Don’t be strangers!!!

We should be working together and building synergy as much as possible. There could well be applications being developed in another country that would be a great match for more well known projects.

@Leadership How about it?

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Just wanted to drop that @tiago89 is doing god’s work. I recently participated in the Rust/vibe coding bootcamp and experience was top :raising_hands:

In addition to everything that was done in 2024 with ICP Hub Portugal :portugal: notably the Open Internet Summer.

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Hi @Thyassa ,

Thanks for reaching out.

From my personal point of view, things will go up a significant notch next Quarter.

Do you remember “Supernova” Hackathon almost 3 years ago? So the Hubs Network announced yesterday that there will be “World Computer Hacker League” on Q3.

We are still finishing the details, but I feel it’s going to be much, much better than Supernova (at least will be working for it).

Think that IC is getting easier and easier to onboard devs. When I started, we didn’t even had MOPS :sweat_smile: Nowadays we have ICP Ninja and Vibe Coding. We can do so much more, looking forward to see what projects build.

About previous hackathons, on the EU front, think they went “ok”. Numbers wise, at least in PT/FR side we have been bringing about 100 devs a Quarter, usually between 10 to 15 projects battle on a hackathon and around 3 projects eventually find something worth building and launch on the IC.

Be aware that this is only 1 vertical, there is also vertical Awareness (X posts and spaces, Meetups, TG Community and Investor/Devs/Founders BizDev) and vertical Acceleration (where we support IC teams)

In PT/FR, on the Acceleration we have supported IC Toolkit, Appic DAO, Onicai, Lendfinity, FAI3, Tru Market, and we give around one advice session to many startups. But we try to focus our resources and time more on our Accelerated startups.

Last but not least, there is also good output and collaboration on improving educational material.

I would like to highlight and point to the “Vibe Code Done Right” and the template we created for our participants. Think any IC Dev should experiment with its instructions and adapt to their personal project.

Session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuNUy13wmlI&t=5753s
Repo: GitHub - pt-icp-hub/IC-Vibe-Coding-Template: Full Stack + LLM Canister template, ready with tests and AI workflows that accelerate your work on the IC.

And this is the Rust Bootcamp they followed last month:

Repo:

And more will come, as mentioned, excited with the potential of WCHL, soon there will be more details. Hang in there.

PS.: this month the EU Alliance will do a Vibeathon, as soon as Luma link is ready will update here as well. :+1:

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Supernova was amazing and helped draw attention to many great projects, but looking at it, its kind of a “where are they now situation…”

Lessons need to be learned from what happened between now and then. It would be great to hear from the winners that are still around (Cubetopia @joey_icp, Kinic @apotheosis …) and the ones who aren’t to see what worked, what could be improved this time around etc.

Any updates on who the judges will be? The first one was majority VCs which isn’t really the right kind of support someone developing on the IC needs, but the IC was in it’s infancy back then. I sincerely hope there are more people with a creative and technological background from the IC community involved going forward.

As to the current local hackathons. I am just curious about the teams that are coming out of the hackathons and incubations etc. Is there more we can do to highlight and support them?

Unless anyone was part of a hackathon, I doubt anyone else knows any of the teams or what they were building, goals etc.

I have seen a couple of hackathon entrants post on the forums, but very few. Would be good to see more presence. There are many, many amazing devs who can answer questions and great tools they may not be aware about.

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SuperNova was a lot of fun!

At that time I get the sense that we were looking for “founders”. So the constraints were - technical founder, web3, with a good idea, that would demo the IC, but also be a good product. This is hyper-niche. 0.05% to 0.1% of devs are web3 devs. Maybe 1% have product ideas. Maybe 3% of those product ideas become successes.

VC’s vet. They take 10,000 entrants and pick 5. In the judging setting in a hackathon - does this still make sense? In most cases, they are not a great value add after, unless they themselves are founder / operators. Most are not… also most VC fail hard.

Are founders still the target?

We were the first people to index ALL of the actual apps running on the IC. It was cool surfacing them and seeing what the IC was being used for. Since then a few others added this capability - Dfinity etc. A lot of people were trying the IC for toy apps. Thousands and thousands of “hello worlds”.

It became immediately apparent to me, that under AI’s spotlight, traditional search was dead. So we turned to work on the vector DB. This is poised to be super useful for many people - we speak with users everyday and its cool to see how they have been actively looking for a place to store things they find throughout the day and are able to summarize and discover with AI later. These people are not web3 natives. Founders need to talk to users. If some of these hackathon projects seek to become products - there might be an easy way to support them by connecting them to users; also fun for people in the IC ecosystem to try out new things.

Startups have limited resources and need to pivot fast to find product market fit. Before, during, and after SNS we have discussions with serial founders in the ICP ecosystem (Dom is an amazing resource / so is Lomesh and many more) - this is what helps us to get to the product with the best odds of success.

Founders who have some experience are AMAZING adds. Serial Technical Founders are rare and they are often polymaths! Add more of these please :slight_smile:

What’s the goal of the recent hackathons?

Web3 has a bunch of people looking to make it rich quick.. point farmers etc. Most legit hackathons would weed these people out first. What is left will largely be college kids or new devs getting into web3.

Is the goal marketing? Getting investors? Getting founders? Getting college kids? Making new tech? Vibe coding? Hitting news headlines?

It would be interesting to make an OC with the hackathon winners and connect them to founders and users in the space.

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