The main events this week were two days of presentations where the hackathon teams showcased their ships in a pitch to mentors. Our prep was time consuming but fruitful. There were 3 pre-requisites including a pitch deck for a 4 minute talk. In our case that contained a 2 minute demo so we had to condense the previous screenplay.
The Expo week was subdivided into days, sessions, and tables. Thirty-five projects had their own Airmeet table where mentors, and anybody else who was interested, joined for the pitch and ensuing discussion.
We were fortunate with the mentors as we were assigned exactly the people we'd like to present to: Mike Goelzer from Protocol Labs and Carson Farmer from Textile. We’ve been looking to connect with an IPFS insider for years. Mike is a genial type who leads key developments. Carson, a Textile cofounder, turns out to be a former academic in NYC and was sympathetic to our use case. (We ended up using Textile’s tech for the storage of crucial metadata.)
The pitch went smoothly. Our Pitch Deck is publicly available. The slide titles follow.
tl;dr
Problem: Climate researchers need data with authenticity and provenance
Solution: Provide canonical climate data via the UN and country governments
Hackathon Team
Timeline
Our Needs
The feedback from our pitch was insightful and illuminating. We barely touched on technical issues, instead focusing on our growth needs. As a result, we have some fundamental thinking to do, like nailing down exactly what the benefits of our solution are. We were also offered intros to potential collaborators and heard tips for funding sources. We’re totally grateful to our mentors for the time they put in.
As usual, Vivek played his maître d’ role with aplomb while Sachin coordinated the infra. Thanks to all! 🙏🙏