About this site

What is this?

As mentioned on the front page, this is an experiment to better understand the unique characteristics of blockchain technology, and how it might used to address challenges that are not served by conventional databases and web servers. Blockchain technology may represent an opportunity to support existing volunteer movements without creating yet another 'hub' that seeks to centralize this activity.

Why did you make it?

For Volunteers:

Volunteers deserve to be recognized in perpetuity. On the blockchain the records of volunteer contributions are resilient.

For Volunteer Organizations:

Because many volunteer organizations and/or recognition initiatives come and go, and the new ones don't get the chance to build upon the successes of the past when an organization dissolves or stops paying its bills.

For Calgary:

Calgary is famous for its volunteer spirit, and all Calgarians deserve to be recognized and proud of this fact. This registry will help tell that story across the world and for future generations, and will hopefully encourage more people to step up and do great things for their community.

Is this ready for production?

Heck no. This is a very early, not ready for primetime, proof of concept for a 'distributed app' to share information with permanent storage and open access. It consists of a smart contract to store data on the ethereum blockchain and a web interface to interact with it. Anyone can read/write to the contract, and anyone can create their own web apps to provide a portal for these interactions.

The contract address is on the Rinkeby Test Network 0x8b963ede1E20d93eC2d73afaB54368F07DE0d382

The source code for the smart contract and the web interface is available on github.

This CivicTechYYC blockchain experiment is based on open-source code from the EtherShare project

What is CivicTechYYC?

Glad you asked. A whole website has been created to share the CivicTechYYC story - visit CivicTechYYC.ca to learn more.