Hacklens

A social network that supports social graph-driven team formation, curated newsfeeds for attendees, and sophisticated use of smart contracts to incentivize builders and their communities post hackathon (powered by Lens Protocol)

For the users it has the following features to help them form, launch and sustain projects:

• Smart matching allows hackathon attendees to find teammates based on social graph matching.

• Teammate discover: Possible teammates are presented based on mutual follows for sponsors, hackathon teams & other hackers

• Smart filter allows users to filter by skill, motivations & experience

• Hackathon goals allows users to find co-founders, competitive teams or casual teams just for learning

• User profiles includes social graph mutual users, sponsors and teams followed

• Team formation flow using chat minting a team NFT

• Newsfeed allowing sponsors to update attendees and team to share and promote their projects

• Social smart contracts

Detailed features

Social smart contracts

• Smart prizes allow sponsors to use the follow module to reward projects that gain 1K, 10K, 100K follows.

• Web3 ecosystem benefit: Smart prizes encourage teams to continue with their projects (and act as a flagship for their sponsors protocols) after hackathons. This leads to most meaningful benefit for the Web3 ecosystem especially as community forms around projects

• Supporter rewards allow sponsors to the use the follow and mirror modules to reward early followers and those that promote projects to wider community

• Web3 ecosystem benefit: Allows projects to build a community around their project. This keep “new to Web3” friends formed at hackathons interested in the Web3 after hackathons. Everybody loves a airdrop!

Proof of registration protocol

Hacklens has interactive hacker matching and a dynamic newsfeed. This means the hackathon experience starts at registration. At this point, hacklens users can meaningfully engage with the hackathons and the Web3 ecosystem.

Partial Teams Matching

Teams need to have balanced skillsets. Team of 5 Frontend engineers will not be as effective as one of a more diverse skillset (Frontend, backend, blockchain dev & product manager). Algorithm should rank higher participants with skillsets complementary to user’s skillset. Once you’re in a team your wind-rose-skillset diagram also features team skills diagram. That could be achieved in many ways by getting an average or maximum of users (future consideration). When you see profiles of teams you can also see these skillsets.

Sponsors dashboard

The sponsor analytics dashboards allow sponsors to monitor

• Number of followers

• Skillset and experience of followers

• Engagement with their protocol post hackathon

These features allow sponsors to target their developer activation efforts, leading to more informed and educated developers and a healthier Web3 ecosystem.

Notification Protocol - EPNS

Using the https://epns.io/, teams are set to receive notifications for events about sponsored technologies, with the opt-out. During the team, formation stage teams are given the option to choose the technologies for their project with a single page view of the sponsors and the technologies they offer. Hackers are prompted to install the EPNS on their phone in order to receive push notifications. On the technical end, Profile NFT of the social profile is used in a merkel root verification of the team members’s wallets, technologies used and direct notifications of specific sponsor events such as workshops. Hackers can still get access to a non-curated feed of notifications, but by default these are only delivered notifications for the technologies that they use.

Hacklens features a Registration and Attendance protocol. That is a combination of established POAP (Proof ofAttendance Protocol) and entirely novel Proof-Of-Registration-Protocol (PORP). Other mechanics include a Social Protocol (Aave Lens), Team Matching Protocol (Intentions and Correlations filtering), a notifier protocol (EPNS) (automatic opt in of relevant events and sessions related to the hackathon project, automated process for organisers/sponsors), Analytics Dashboard (Hackers, Sponsors and Organisers specific dashboards to see the attrition rates, distribution of project verticals, technologies used).Target Users

Any hackathon participant who wants to streamline their team-making process. They are able to broadcast a message to the public channel, which can be any arbitrary message, This allows hackers to form teams outside of the norms. Such as for example a team made up of entirely backend engineers. While the team selection process prefers to promote a diversity of skillsets within a team, it is still ultimately up to the hackers to decide how they with their team be organised.

Registration Protocol and Proof of Registration Protocol (PORP)

By combining a new derivative of the Proof of Attendance Protocol, we create a two step experience for hackers on the dashboard. Starting with the issuance of a PORP at the time of registration, a hacker is given access to the team formation flow of the dashboard, an organiser will be able to track the number of issued PORP’s, and these PORP’s will be used as the ticketing solution for future hackathon events. Upon attending the event, the hackers will receive their POAP, which will grant them access to the rest of the dashboard, including the team collaboration components that replace the need for a Web2 based collaboration solution, as well as the opprtunity to select the technologies that the teams wish to use for their project from the sponsors list.

Social Protocol using Lens

Each user uses a Lens profile. Each user can follow any other profile at any time. In addition, teams have

their own profiles. These divide into Sponsor Profiles and Hacking Team Profiles. These are full fledged Lens network members and are able to follow User Profiles. Users followed by a Team Profile form the team in question. That is executed through a smart contract, as per Lens guidelines. Many users can follow a team, yet each team can only follow as many people as allowed in a given hackathon - otherwise are not admitted.

Team Matching Protocol

Intent matching

Each participant indicates their ‘determined-to-win‘ or ‘no-rush-exploration‘ choice (exploration vs exploration dilemma) as an indication of their goal for the hackathon. That is solely for the purposes of matching, and is disregarded later. Organizers will have access to these statistics. In the matching stage participants from the opposite intent are excluded from the pool of potential teammates. That is unless the edge case where the pool of non-teamed-up participants gets depleted.

Specific matching

In the next step the users get a list of other profiles. In depth design of the display order algorithm is a task

beyond the scope of this paper, hence here are two of the possible sorters.

Social Sort

Social matching is the default filter for the ’exploration’ choice. It uses Lens following mechanics and hence it’s not available to first-time users of the application. Each two users have a computable representation of degree of common social interest. These include friend status (mutual following), a mutual friend, sponsors that both users follow, and third party teams that both users follow. Social clustering weights these in decreasing order.

Skills Sort

The default filter for those with ’determined-to-win’ plan for the hackathon. To use this filter you need to put numbers as self-assessed skillset in three domains - Product Owner, Frontend, and Backend experience as an integer between 1 and 5 inclusive. Fourth number is the square root of time in web3, expressed in months. Each skillset is then a vector (represented on a wind-rose diagram), and they can lead to a sorting order in many ways. From the point of view of the ecosystem it might be worth considering promoting matches with higher mean difference in ’time in Web3’ feature to promote knowledge transmission and encourage onboarding hackers.

Partial Teams Matching

Teams need to have balanced skillsets. Team of 5 Frontend engineers will not be as effective as one of a more diverse skillset. Algorithm should rank higher participants with skillsets complimentary to user’s skillset. Once you’re in a team your wind-rose-skillset diagram also features team skills diagram. That could be achieved in many ways by getting an average or maximum of users (future consideration). When you see profiles of teams you can also see these skillsets.

Notification Protocol - EPNS

Using the https://epns.io/, teams are set to receive notifications for events about sponsored technologies, with the opt out. During the team formation stage teams are given the option to choose the technologies for their project with a single page view of the sponsors and the technologies they offer. Hackers are prompted to install the EPNS on their phone in order to receive push notifications. On the technical end, Profile NFT of the social profile is used in a merkel root verification of the team members’s wallets, technologies used and direct notifications of specific sponsor events such as workshops. Hackers can still get access to a non-curated feed of notifications, but by default these are only delivered notifications for the technologies that they use.

Analytics Dashboard

Information on other teams is lacking, both for hackers, and organisers with disparate data sources, manual data handling and lack of single source of truth for the organisers, sponsors and hackers. By providing a dashboard for to see insights on the technologies used, project categories, and other statistics contextualised to the user, be it hacker, sponsor or organiser.