The goal of the Pixels Camp hackathon is to single out and reward creativity and innovation by providing participants with an opportunity to work together within a time frame of 48 hours to create something awesome.
The Hackathon is an important part of the event. Every candidate is advised to put a team together a take part in it. Participation is what makes Pixels Camp great. The more we have evidence that you participated in the hackathon and other activities, the more your chances of joining us next year improve.
We don't expect you to come to Pixels Camp to attend a few talks, that's not the spirit. We expect you to join us for three days, all-in, participate, communicate, learn and teach, and network with the community.
Now...
This year we decided to break with our classical approach to find the best hackathon projects based on a voting system and try something entirely new. Something that's never been done before.
Based on the principles of full decentralization and transparency that blockchain technologies promise, we've decided to make everything about Pixels Camp, including picking up the winning projects of this year's Hackathon, completely based on the dynamics of what you can find in the real world and a real economy.
For this, we've created a digital coin, called Exposure, which will be used for nearly all activities around the Pixels Camp event and community. You can read more about Exposure and how to start using our coin here. In fact, you should do it as soon as possible.
In a nutshell, this year every participant is an entrepreneur, an investor, a service provider, a customer, a marketing guy, a growth strategist, a CTO looking for help, a mentor and a trader.
The best will hopefully emerge from this equilibrium, and the incentives we've put in place, just like the best usually thrive in the real world.
So here's what changed:
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There is no more jury. Instead, now we will have Angels. People we invite to live the Pixels Camp experience. They have more money than most and will invest in the projects they think deserve it.
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There is no more voting system. Putting your hard earned money, also known as Exposure, or simply
EXPs, in the projects you love, is your vote. -
Every investment in a project, either coming from Angels, its team members, good friends or general participants will be entirely traceable, transparent and incorruptible, by design.
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You can invest in a project, at the beginning, middle or at the end of Pixels Camp, when the projects are presented. It's up to you to define your strategy. We will teach you to do it, and provide you with tools to make it as easy as possible.
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Investing in real time during the projects presentation session is hard. Instead, we built a page where you can take quick notes and tick your favorite projects as you get to know them. In the end, just before the winners are announced, you can quickly decide where to invest the rest of your precious
EXPs.
For the rest of the rules and incentives, read the Equilibrium section of the detailed Exposure page.
Sounds complicated? It is a little bit. But it's also highly interesting to see how this experiment plays out in such a vibrant and active tech-savvy event like Pixels Camp. Plus, you get to learn a lot about blockchain, market dynamics, and game theory. And in the end, all the data is yours, for you to keep exploring and learning from it.
To make it less complicated, one of the first sessions in the calendar will a full talk on Exposure and the new rules, on the Segfault stage, at 2 PM, with Q&A.
Let's get started with the Hackathon rules now.
Any Pixels Camp approved participant can apply, as long as they are on the premises during those 48 hours (within reason – you are allowed to go out and get some air, sleep in a proper bed if you want to, etc.)
Groups must be larger than 2 elements, all of whom must be Pixels Camp participants. Teams are advised to recruit elements with a wide diversity of interests that complement each other in their knowledge areas. The broader the skills in a team, the higher the probabilities to surprise the angels, investors and your peers with innovative ideas.
To find your team members you can use Slack or Twitter to speak out to other participants, or you can meet them IRL on site when Pixels Camp starts.
Participants can only join one project at a time.
Ideas, concepts, and team organization are tasks that can be thought out before the event, but the project itself should be developed during the 48 hour period.
The hackathon projects are now managed from the main Pixels Camp website. To register a new project for your team, log into your account, click the top right drop-down menu and press "Create Project."
From there you provide a title for your project, an intro (it will be used in the listings) and a full description.
You can use Markdown in the description, to make it more attractive.
Now you need to enter the members of your team, a pretty cover image for your project, an optional video if you have one and your code repository, also optional.
When you think that everything's ready for the world to see, tick the "Enable project" option. Submit.
You can always come to your Pixels Camp account and edit the project. Press the "Edit Project" button in the top right drop-down menu.
Once your project is edited, you'll have access to its permalinked page.
This is the page that everyone sees when your project is enabled. It deliberately tries to imitate a Kickstarter campaign because that's precisely what you'll be doing during the 48-hour hackathon: campaigning for your project to win, until the very last projects presentation session.
In the page, you'll see the title of your project, the big image or video, the description and the team.
You can also comment on the project. Teams should be on the lookout for comments on their projects and answer them. You never know if it's an investor willing to bet EXPs on you.
And most importantly, the page shows how many EXPs this project's got in funding and what's its wallet address if an investor decides to deposit a few extra EXPs in it.
To learn how to send EXP tokens to a project click here.
Once it's public, you can share your project page with anyone, including people outside Pixels Camp.
As an investor, it's hard to decide on who to invest. There are so many projects to see, and they're constantly evolving and changing during the 48-hour hackathon.
Plus, the final presentation session is key to see the results and the team's presentation skills and energy and should save some of your funds, if not most, for that decisive moment.
To cope with this problem, we've built an online notebook right into the Pixels Camp website. As always, log-in and click "View Notes" on the top right drop-down menu.
You can use this tool to keep track of the notes you take with each project you visit and get to know about. You can also use it to take notes during the final session, so you don't need to worry about voting, sorry, investing while you watch the presentations.
And then, when you're ready, go to your notes, make up your mind, and invest wisely in those you believe deserve your precious EXPs.
We will give everyone 30 minutes after the final projects presentation session to work out their final investments before we calculate the winners, so relax.
Pixels Camp is constantly trying to promote the public projects as soon as they are enabled. The more promotion you get, the more chances you get to be invested.
One the places you can look for new projects in our public listings page.
The programming event will last exactly 48 hours, starting on the first day. You can see the full schedule here.
Everyone should have their projects public and enabled by the 3rd day, Saturday, at 1 pm.
If you're not planning to present your project in the finals, then please disable your project.
At 2 pm, everyone presenting a project should head to the main stage for testing their laptops.
At 3 pm the final projects presentation begins. Everyone should be ready to get on stage. Projects will be called by the same order as they've been registered on the website.
Each project will be presented on stage by a single representative team member, who'll have 90 seconds to pitch and/or demo your project.
To get a sense of what we're talking about, take a look at last year's project presentations video.
Pixels Camp will award the ten most well funded projects. The count will take place exactly 30 minutes after the last project presentation on Saturday.
Each of the winning projects will receive a handful of prizes, some of which offered by our sponsors and partners, and big beautiful Pixels Camp 2017 trophy to keep by the fireplace at home, proudly.
We will also award some of the winners from fun competitions like the Quiz Show, CTF, Chasing Ghost, etc.
Finally, we'd like to award our top investors, that is, those who were able to accumulate more EXPs after the final redistribution.
To know more about the rules, please read the Equilibrium section in our Exposure page.
We have a FAQ here too.