The problem Farcaster Writing Hackathon solves

Social media is here to stay: it's how people all over the world connect, learn, and get their news. Existing, corporate social media platforms are problematic – they struggle with balancing free speech and censorship, prioritize corporate interests over those of their users, and do not allow the creators who are generating all the value for these platforms to own their audience or their content.

Farcaster will solve these challenges. Farcaster's vision draws in passionate people who care deeply about making Farcaster succeed. Up til now, it's been developers with the most opportunity to contribute to Farcaster - buiding apps, clients, dashboards, APIs, frames, cast actions, etc.

But there are other passionate builders in the Farcaster ecosystem who also want to contribute to Farcaster's future: the writers. As Paragraph founder Colin Armrstong said, "Writers are builders of ideas, knowledge, truth, and community." Steve Jobs once said, “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller."

The vision for the writing hackathon is to give voice to the many thinkers and writers in Farcaster. The Writing Hackathon was imagined as a way to bring writers together to publish a ton of Farcaster content en masse, leveraging Onchain Summer and network effects to create a PR blitz for Farcaster.

Challenges I ran into

As far as I'm aware, this is the first event of its kind. Organizing it without an existing playbook required creativity and flexibility. I had initially wanted to organize just a small, in-person event in my local city. However, when I casted about the Writing Hackathon there was so much interest and enthusiasm from people all over the world who wanted to participate virtually. Being just one person organizing this event in my spare time, I didn't have the bandwidth to to run the virtual event as well, but I didn't want to lose the enthusiasm and momentum from the community. To solve for this challenge, I brought on additional organizers and created a separate URL/Virtual track. I reached out to people in the Farcaster community I had relationships with to get additional help and support. TED and NounishProf stepped up to run the virtual track which worked out wonderfully.