Odyssey[1], a blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) hackathon formerly known as the Dutch Blockchain Hackathon and Blockchaingers, is coming back for its third edition to connect innovative teams and ideas with governmental, corporate, and non-profit partners.
The hackathon is backed by government agencies, organizations and companies including the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations of the Netherlands, De Nederlandsche Bank (the Dutch Central Bank), the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM), the European Union Regional Development Fund, Deloitte, and KLM, and will see 100 teams building prototypes to address 20 societal challenges.
These challenges cover areas including energy transition, public utility networks, (self-) governance, self-owned digital identity, biometric data communication, financial inclusion and security, cargo insurance, digital nation infrastructure, wildlife and biodiversity restoration, food value chain sustainability, and open crisis and disaster management.
One of them focuses on creating a Dutch government-backed next generation digital identity[2], for adoption in all of Europe, where the citizen, not the government, would be the starting point. The Dutch ministry of the interior said the idea is to develop “a truly new approach to reliably, easily establishing a digital identity.”
The ministry said the solution must function on all devices commonly owned by the general public, empower the citizen to have control over their own attributes, and that the level of the system/bridge must be “substantial.”
Another challenge by the Dutch ministry of the interior focuses on creating an open source “privacy breach detector[3]” that’s compliant with GDPR which would help governments prevent privacy breaches when publishing new (governmental) open data in existing data fields.
Commenting on the upcoming Odyssey hackathon, Raymond Knops, state secretary for the Interior and Kingdom Relations of the
