With Blockchain being fast adopted across diverse applications as accounting, land records, contract management, stock markets and futures trading, the Karnataka govt wants to cash in on the trend.
Apart from bringing out a "White Paper on Blockchain use in Governance" as a prelude to a Policy on Blockchain, the government will be conducting a Blockchain Hackathon for governance as the first level towards the adoption of the technology.
The Blockchain Hackathon for Governance will be held from January 19-21, at Koramangala Indoor Stadium, and will look to create demonstrable prototypes of the use of blockchain in government applications.
According to a statement from the government, experts from departments like home, transportation, tourism, forests, agriculture, and finance have been consulted to develop use cases for each sector.
“The use cases will address a variety of issues across domains, and will involve multi stakeholder decision making, such as Cross-Domain multi-stakeholder decision making in case of beneficiary management of welfare schemes, tracing the Chain of Custody of Agricultural/ Horticultural/Forest for better quality and price for farmers, Identity Ownership Management for data privacy and Real-Time record maintenance for land records management and taxation,” the statement says.
The hackathon will be open to students, startups, and other IT professionals and those who provide cloud-based blockchain technology will be invited to provide platforms that participants can use during the hackathon. This will be a ‘residential’ hackathon, which means that participants cannot leave the venue for the 48 hours of the hackathon.
Each team should comprise 3-5 individuals, who will work on individual problem statements provided by the different government departments. Participants can form teams and register ahead of the event, or register as an individual and be teamed up at the venue with other individual participants. Each team will have to submit a brief statement of the problem they are attempting to solve with blockchain.
Government officials, heads of the concerned departments, industry experts, and the government’s Knowledge Partners, will act as mentors during the hackathon, and provide information, resources, and support for teams, and monitor the entire hackathon process
Each team will have to submit their entry in the form of a video. The videos must contain a screen capture of the blockchain prototype developed, including key code-constructs, architectural details, and a presentation of the use-case itself, along with a voice over from all of the team members. A total of 10 teams will be awarded
Winners will be awarded based on the functional code developed to solve problem of choice, how blockchain has been used in the solution, user experience of the solution developed, design principles used in the solution, and potential to use solution within government.
Winners will be invited to present their solution at a special Blockchain summit organised by the government on February 16, 2018.