3ThingsForever

Preserving acts of kindness for future generations.

A CivicTechYYC blockchain experiment

About the experiment

This experiment is an attempt to answer the question - how might we use blockchain technology to help preserve an existing dataset of volunteer deeds, long after the organization that created it (or the platform that hosted it) is gone?

A possible timeline

Technical approach

Proponents of blockchain and distributed web technology speak at length about its decentralized, immutable qualities as a means to combat censorship, but we might also think of it as a means to combat atrophy and being forgotten.

Our goal is to make #3ThingsforCanada data as accessible as possible for as long as possible and as cheaply as possible. There are a bunch of approaches we might take, each with advantages and trade-offs.

Based on what we've learned and tried, we are now focusing on the InterPlanetary File System, or IPFS for short.

As a result, this web page is not will not be hosted on a traditional web server but rather a series of decentralized nodes, and the content is not will not be addressed by its location, but but the unique 'fingerprint' of the data. That's why the address of this page will seem a little strange.

Uploading to IPFS seems like a reasonable balance between cost and longevity. Content is kept alive on IPFS through a process known as 'pinning.' This costs a bit of money (and by a 'bit' we mean a tiny tiny fraction compared to regular hosting), and here's the key: anyone can pin anyone elses data to keep it alive.


See it in action

Here it is - the #3ThingsforCanada data as obtained from Twitter (unfortunately Facebook doesn't play nice with this kind of thing). The entire dataset has been included, sorted on a (hidden) column flagging 'actual' good deeds as opposed to shout-outs, promotions, and the like. A few additional columns have been hidden for legibility. Browse below or download the entire dataset as a .csv file.

Members of our group have used this file to perform text and sentiment analyses, which yield some interesting insights about the 3ThingsforCanada initiative. Who knows what else people might do with this data in the future?