2022 Meteor Hackathon 3rd Place Winners: Team De-Central Budapest
The 3-person De-Central Budapest team built “the eBay of altruism” for the 2022 Meteor Hackathon. See why their impressive app alTRUE won 3rd place now:
Can we use a decentralized, open-source platform to conquer global scarcity and boost sustainability?
That’s what Team De-Central Budapest ventured to find out.
They believe society can’t continue when rampant human consumption and wasted resources threaten mass extinctions across the planet.
According to them, independent communities provide bottom-up solutions to these needs. They’re the foundation for resilient, sustainable social and economic systems.
However, small communities lack the technology to collect, process, and share their available resources. They also have a much harder time connecting with others who may be able to fulfill their resource needs.
De-Central Budapest envisioned a secure tool for a more efficient allocation of available resources and real needs. So they developed their alTRUE app using our open-source Meteor framework during the 2022 Hackathon.
Let’s meet the minds behind the mission and hear how their trusted F/LOSS marketplace works for a more collaborative economy.
Creating Impact: The 2022 Meteor Hackathon Theme
For this year’s Hackathon, we asked teams of no more than five to develop an impactful application using Meteor Framework.
Teams were given free rein to explore any field of interest, from environmental to social causes and everything in between. Likewise, they could build a product with a clear revenue stream, a non-profit, open-source, or something entirely new.
However, all Hackathon coding had to occur between September 23 and September 30. Then the app had to be usable and deployed on Galaxy at the end.
To determine the winners, we judged apps based on criteria such as:
- Impact. The idea must be helpful in some way. It could be an impactful business model, an ingenious way to solve a problem or aid a cause, a new non-profit idea, etc.
- Realistic usability. The app must be deployable and practical, with an eye for intuitive user experiences, thoughtful user interfaces, and a plan to scale.
Each team in the Hackathon earned Galaxy credits and a certificate of participation. The top three winners were eligible to receive cash prizes, social media shoutouts, and chats with the Meteor Core team.
Team Fasalians scored first place in the 2022 Hackathon with their app. And Team SUS-GAWKY developed the CarbonZero app that took home the silver.
So now it’s time to round out our trio of spotlights with a look at our third-place winners:
Meet Team De-Central Budapest 💪
Hailing from Budapest, Hungary, the co-founders of De-Central Budapest launched in 2015 as an incubator hub and knowledge center for decentralization. They’ve been researching and working with blockchain technologies and the peer-to-peer economy ever since.
The three-person De-Central Budapest crew consists of Ildikó Keleti and:
Dániel Róka, a mathematician and software developer with a decade of experience in the Fintech world. He describes himself as a Bitcoin evangelist and distributed systems advocate. Check out his GitHub repositories.
Endre Fórika, an Information Technology Architect who’s passionate about open-source, cryptocurrency, freedom of speech, cloud security, and internet privacy. You can find him in the city during the winter and in the “sacred nature of the Transylvanian mountains” come summer. Here’s his GitHub.
These three dynamos combined their superpowers to embody the 12 Permaculture Ethics and Design Principles. For the Hackathon, the team focused on building an app based on the concept of fair share, which states:
“We are provided with times of abundance which enables us to share with others.”
Taking inspiration from the fair share credo, Team De-Central Budapest developed alTRUE.
Think of the alTRUE App Like “The eBay of Altruism” 💝
Altruism is a principle and moral practice of being selflessly concerned for other people’s and animals’ well-being and/or happiness. Without seeking to personally gain anything from the interaction, altruistic people aim to improve the quality of life of those around them.
De-Central Budapest built alTRUE, a very unique app that promotes altruism and provides a framework for directed generosity. It benefits anyone who wishes to give or receive on an altruistic basis.
Technically speaking, the team developed a trusted F/LOSS P2P marketplace for globally-connected local communities to participate in a collaborative economy.
Individuals, communities, and organizations can connect with others to share their resources, services, and needs in exchange for money, goods, and other services. Users can even give away resources for free.
Here’s How the alTRUE App Works
Let’s say local farmers want to share their available machinery. They’ll create a listing for other community farmers to access the machinery, so they don’t need to buy and maintain those expensive tools independently.
As more farmers continue sharing tools and equipment, the entire community’s output, cost-efficiency, and sustainability improve.
Now let’s say those farmers need extra help during harvests. They can post listings for their needs, and parents can bring their kids to the farms to volunteer and learn about growing food.
There’s less waste and more community involvement, which helps build up the area.
To realize these sustainability goals and set the foundation for alTRUE, De-Central Budapest focused on three core ideas:
1. Transparently Secure Resource Management 🫶
The team needed a cryptographically scalable open-source framework on a reliable hosting platform. That was easy to solve with Meteor and Galaxy.
Like eBay, the alTRUE app is a collection of “Listings.” Users post their needs and resources, which may include:
- Physical goods, surpluses, supplies, support, and aid capacity
- Assets, money, or any personal property that can be converted into money
- Technical, creative, supportive, and physical services
To create a listing, users add a title, upload an image or file, describe the listing, tag it, and toggle whether it’s a Goods, Service, or Need:
The listing goes live to the community under the appropriate Goods and Services category or Needs category.
To keep everything organized, alTRUE gives users separate screens for their active listings of:
Goods:
Services:
And Needs:
Once users post their listings, they’ll appear on the community pages for others to see.
2. Effective, Collaborative Allocation of Resources and Needs 🤲
For the alTRUE platform to work, it must have individuals, communities, and organizations with a shared mindset. They must be motivated to offer their surpluses and respond to others’ needs.
So when users browse the Needs page, they can see precisely what others are looking for. Rather than someone throwing out an old phone case, for example, they may discover someone who actually needs it.
Similarly, users can offer up their Goods and Services, which range from physical items (like last-gen laptops) to skills and capabilities (like website work).
The alTRUE app is almost a mash-up of eBay and Craigslist, except for a few major differences like:
3. Trust 🤝
De-Central Budapest wants to keep the alTRUE platform invite-only and self-curating to maintain high-quality content.
The open-source code and community curation, where everyone is encouraged to learn and give back following the Sustainable Development Agenda, establishes trust between users and the creators.
People who want to fulfill a need or provide a service message the listing creator to start a dialogue or inquiry. Once all the details are decided, the listing creator can choose to accept the offer:
A user’s Active Deals page functions like a dashboard. Deals are defined as any listed Goods, Services, or Needs. Here users can read all the messages, responses, and inquiries to their Deals at a glance:
Pretty neat, right?
We love the impactful idea and development De-Central Budapest came up with. Their achievement earned the team third place in the 2022 Meteor Hackathon, which awarded them a $500 cash prize and $250 in Galaxy credits.
Now let’s take a look at:
The alTRUE Tech Stack
Fitting their ethos, the alTRUE toolkit prioritizes data privacy and open-source development. Here’s an overview of the alTRUE tech stack powering their P2P marketplace:
- Node.js
- Vue.js
- Bootstrap 5
- Meteor
As part of our Hackathon requirements, the alTRUE app had to be launched on Galaxy with Meteor Cloud, the only full-service cloud offering for deploying, hosting, and scaling Meteor apps.
Small teams like the De-Central Budapest trio can scale confidently with zero DevOps, download packages from our open-source community, and collaborate with other Meteor users in one centralized dashboard.
Launching their app in one week with these resources proves that anyone can build solutions for problems like scarcity and sustainability with accessible, open-source frameworks.
And those are just a few of the:
5 Reasons Why De-Central Budapest Loves Building With Meteor
De-Central Budapest first started building with Meteor in 2017. They developed a sophisticated condominium management app that allows condo owners to discuss issues related to the building, report errors, vote on measures, and make accounting transparent.
The team says, “That app is pretty unique in its complexity and number of functionalities. It’s probably the largest and most complex Meteor app ever built.”
De-Central Budapest was eager to work in Meteor again because:
- It’s a well-thought-out framework. “All parts of it fit very well together.”
- It’s very well documented. Once you understand it, it’s incredibly easy to work with.
- There’s no need to deal with two separate models. The team can think in terms of the same model objects on both the client and server sides.
- It can be easily extended with packages.
- “It is not opinionated.”
Despite those positive sentiments, all builds go through their share of ups and downs.
How De-Central Budapest Navigates Scaling and Other Challenges
The team’s condo app already has thousands of users, so they’re starting to face serious scaling issues. They’re working hard to manage these, with more or less success at times.
Regarding challenges the team faced, De-Central Budapest says the biggest obstacle during the Hackathon was moving from Blaze to Vue.js. They used Blaze for five years to build the condo app but never used Vue.
According to the crew, Vue.js is “very different in its workings.” They admit that they still find Blaze with the manual:ViewModel package much more straightforward to use.
De-Central Budapest also had to overcome a way to declare the “should” and “can-be-done features” from all the rest.
What’s Next for De-Central Budapest
The team says they’d like to continue scaling their condo app and building up their altruist economy platform. They hope to extend alTRUE with new functionalities like APIs to connect with multiple instances and compatible applications.
The Galaxy-hosted version has a demo account and an active database with real-life use cases. This instance provides live data for UI/UX improvements.
De-Central Budapest’s apps are open-source, so they welcome anyone who would like to contribute to help make those improvements.
The team says, “If you’re interested and new to Meteor, we’re happy to help you get up to speed by providing teaching and mentoring opportunities.”
So if you’re on board with De-Central Budapest’s mission, we encourage you to reach out to the team!
So How are You Creating Impact with Meteor?
Our Hackathon winners built incredibly impactful apps in just one week with teams of less than five. So what can you achieve with Meteor?
Our open-source framework for seamlessly building and deploying web, iOS, Android, and desktop apps with the same code speeds up development. You can focus on building features instead of configuring disparate components yourself.
Meteor Cloud then empowers you to monitor your app in real-time, custom configure your app’s hosting needs, and use intuitive out-of-the-box features designed by in-house Meteor experts with a decade of Meteor R&D under their belts.
And the best part? You can sign up to join Meteor Cloud for free.
More information about Meteor and the services we offer may be found in this article on Website Planet.
