The past weekend, the team of the Gemeente Zuidhorn - in which I was part of - competed on the first ever hosted Dutch Blockchain Hackathon, here in Groningen. In total 50 teams took part splitted into five different tracks from how to handle identity in the blockchain towards how government can support and benefit from the new emerging technology.
Within the Reinventing Government track, we came up with an idea to distribute government funding easier, more transparent and better to manage/monitor from the fund providers perspective. Although the idea was vage, we tailored in to the specific use-case of giving out money for children of families in need. The Gemeente Zuidhorn calls this program Kindpakket.
Over an extensive period of 48 hours and a lot of Redbull, a demo was build to demonstrate our ideas of how blockchain can be used to improve fund distribution. Since the blockchain is open, also publicly known citizen data can be stored in the blockchain and used. Ethereum allows us to move to a digital age of contracts. A lot of data is already digitalized in the Netherlands and managed by DigiD.
With great competition from the teams in our track and also to our surprise, the jury consiting out of entrepreneur in the blockchain world awarded our idea with the 1st price in this track which comes with founding to continue working on this idea and connections into the world of blockchain and businesses. A key element was the fact that the basic idea can be extend way further to other areas. Many Gemeenten can benefit by it.
We now look happily and confirmed that our idea is good and backed into the future.