Do you have fun programming and hacking?
Do you enjoy working with other people together?
Would you like to contribute to a project about building digital democracy as featured in a recent article in the journal Nature [1]?

Then, please join our upcoming hackathon on the Nervousnet project on 22nd and 23rd April 2016. The goal of the hackathon is to form an interactive platform for individuals to unfold their individual skills and talents and to collectively achieve groundbreaking benefits for society. These benefits may include privacy-preserving and security mechanisms for data sharing, engaging gamifying applications, ethical discrimination-free data analytics and other ideas we encourage you to contribute to this hackathon.

Nervousnet is a decentralized Internet of Things platform for privacy-preserving social sensing services provided as public good [2]. It is implemented as a mobile app and it is open source under the GPL v3 license. Nervousnet is capable to collect and manage sensor data from Android and iOS mobile phones by letting users self-determine the data they locally preserve and the data they remotely share. This forms the main privacy-by-design functionality of the Nervousnet backend. A lightweight local analytics engine residing in the Nervousnet backend provides a high-level API for developers to build data-driven applications. Analytics can be also performed across devices with an implementation of a truly decentralized and privacy-preserving Big Data paradigm: the global analytics engine.

The hackathon provides at least three opportunities for participation:

1. Design and development of the Nervousnet backend: here are opportunities to extend the API of the local analytics engine, implement security in communication or integrate web views and an application store.

2. Design and development of Nervousnet apps: here you can build your own data-driven applications using the high-level API of the local analytics engine. Some examples of cool applications you may think of are the following: earthquake detection, localization and navigation, ambient assisting living, smart home applications, IoT games, and more.

3. Nervousnet challenge: Come up with an algorithm that minimizes information reveal (maximizes privacy) while offering high accuracy of data analytics. You will be given an interface for input/output of the algorithm, a test sample of data, and our benchmark will rank your algorithm in terms of privacy and accuracy at the same time.

We will provide you guidance and supporting material before and during the hackathon.