VitaDAO hackathon funding proposal

Proposals Passed Proposals
1

Project Leads: Alex Dobrin, Laurence Ion

Squad: Ekaterina Melnichikhina, Pritam Kumar Panda

Summary

Proposal for VitaDAO to allocate 27,000 USDC from the Awareness & Longevity Working Group to operate the VitaDAO hackathon via LongHack as a Service Provider, mainly employing Ekaterina and Pritam. See more about the Longhack team here.

Description

A hackathon focusing on longevity is a strong requirement for the future of the longevity field. In order to fight aging, we need to recruit more professionals to the field and provide them with a sustainable platform for doing their job.

Each year new scientists choose the topics of their future research works and make important decisions of taking their careers in certain directions. Their choices may be determined by different factors, like the mentors they meet, books they read, and the events they attend, such as hackathons. Hackathons allow young professionals to see an opportunity to realize their ideas, try their expertise in the entrepreneurial format, network and exchange the experience.

Our target is to attract as many new researchers to the longevity field as possible. We see a hackathon as a great opportunity for recruiting young biotech researchers to interesting longevity projects (see examples here).

This can be a launching point for projects to be funded and further incubated/accelerated by VitaDAO, culminating in a Demo Day with the top longevity VCs and angel investors. Potentially, we could become the YC of longevity.

Longhack, as a team, has already successfully arranged 2 online Longevity hackathons. The Longhack weekend of 24-26 September 2021 gathered together 17 teams and 28 mentors from Europe, Australia, and North America. See the winners here. More about the hackathon from January 2022 read here.

Altogether, the Longhack team attracted around 300 longevity specialists who tackled longevity problems under the supervision of experts like Nir Barzilai, João Pedro de Magalhães, Ronjon Nag, and many others. See more mentors here.

Motivation

Our hackathon provides a doorway for anyone interested in longevity, gives main insights of building a project in the field just within a couple of days, and makes valuable connections between stakeholders of the event.

Main goals:

  • Attract people to the field and help the community grow;

  • Create a space for like-minded people to cooperate;

  • Provide a launching platform for ideas;

  • Help scientists and other longevity experts to express and exchange ideas;

  • Make early-stage startups visible to investors

Implementation and Timeline

The first edition will be kicked off by the end of June (24-26 June, 2022).

Budget

The budget of 27,000 USDC is for operational costs. We will also need prizes for the 6 challenges, which could come from the Longevity Prize

See more details here.

  • Agree
  • Agree with revisions (please comment)
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0 voters

2 Likes
2

IMO the prize(s) should be solely in VITA and the budget should be in a mix of USDC and VITA. Ideally both would include a social contract about not selling the VITA.

3 Likes
3

I also think we should come up with a smart way of giving more VITA than USDC, and wrt prizes, the people who are skeptical of crypto, and already might not value the VITA, so maybe we mention both $ and VITA somehow and then give them a choice, with more VITA if they are happy to take it instead of USDC

2 Likes
4

How is a hackathon different from a conference?

What career stage is the target?

If it’s free registration, why not an international longevity poster competition?

Were the winners recognized for work they were already doing, or for the most intriguing idea they came up with during the conference?

1 Like
5

Hackathon is a competition and it includes active mentoring, workshops, and pitching sessions. During the hackathon new ideas are born and evaluated.
The target audience - is young scientists interested in longevity.

1 Like
6

The prizes for the 6 challenges could come from the Longevity Prize. I’ve changed the budget to 27,000 USDC for just the operational costs.

1 Like
7

This phase 2 proposal has passed and can be implemented now.

1 Like