Hackathon at Sant'Imier · Decentrale 2019

Year: 2019
Location: Sant’Imier, Jura (Switzerland)
Duration: May 31 — June 9, 2019

A gathering in the Swiss mountains

In the spring of 2019, a bunch of people got together in the Jura region of Switzerland. It’s a place with a long history of radical thinking and building alternatives. They met at a space called Decentrale for a ten-day hackathon. But this wasn’t just about writing code. It was about rethinking the technical, organizational, and ethical foundations of a truly fair and decentralized economy.

This wasn’t some random event. It was part of a bigger process. Activists, developers, economists, artists — all kinds of people came together. No fancy titles needed. What united them was the belief that another economy is possible, and that technology can serve people, not corporations.

What we worked on

The work was split into several big topics that got discussed and developed over the ten days.

1. Distributed infrastructure

One of the main discussions was how to build federated and decentralized services. People explored different technologies: some blockchain-based, others lighter peer-to-peer models. The question wasn’t just technical but political too. Where does blockchain make sense and where doesn’t it? How do we make sure the community decides on infrastructure, not just a handful of admins?

They also talked about needing a single login system for all the different services and apps in the ecosystem. The idea of a decentralized “Fairlogin” got a lot of attention.

2. Data ownership and control

With a growing user base all over the world, there was a big challenge: how to keep people’s data safe, in trusted hands, with clear policies for security, backups, and deletion?

The conversation was about data sovereignty. Data isn’t a resource to be exploited. It’s an extension of people and their relationships.

3. Sysadmin and infrastructure management

By then, the ecosystem already had dozens of servers spread across the planet. Each had its own admins, its own configs, its own logic. The hackathon was a chance to start defining a common methodology before things got out of hand.

People also talked about off-site backups in secure locations, and using tools like Kubernetes and Rancher to manage development, testing, and production environments.

4. Fair circular economy

One of the most intense workshops focused on how to build and maintain a web of trust among participants in a fair economy. What makes a project or business “fair”? How do you curate and grow that network? What economic links can you create between different nodes of a cooperative economy?

This connected directly to the FairCoin ecosystem and the Fairo currency. People reviewed exchange rates between Fairo’s purchasing power, FairCoin, and other currencies. The goal was to agree on a first consensus rate.

5. Glocal governance

FairCoop was the case study for exploring governance models that connect the global with the local. How do you make decisions in a community spread across the planet? How do you make sure local voices are heard without losing the ability to coordinate globally?

The hackathon didn’t have all the answers, but it asked the right questions and sketched out possible paths.

More than code: art, music, and hanging out

The hackathon wasn’t just technical work. There was also space for art and reflection. At a nearby venue called Espace Noir, there was an interactive art exhibition exploring the relationship between creativity, technology, and politics.

There were concerts, documentary screenings, and roundtables about social movements like the Yellow Vests. People also played with creative tools like the Totémizateur — a playful machine that turned ground drawings into audiovisual compositions. And there was talk about language and poetry, about building a “geopoetic language” to challenge the dominant technocratic newspeak.

Art wasn’t decoration. It was another way to build community and experience freedom.

Connections to other projects

During those ten days, there was also time to check out other initiatives. A video call introduced Dunifer, a cryptocurrency based on Universal Dividend and Web of Trust, without Bitcoin’s massive energy waste.

There was also a full day dedicated to Holochain, Ceptr, and meta-currency technologies. And a workshop on the money game — a playful way to understand how economic systems work.

Why this hackathon matters

The Sant’Imier 2019 hackathon wasn’t a media event. It wasn’t chasing headlines or corporate funding. It was a humble gathering in a remote valley, among people who believe another economy is possible and are willing to build it, line by line of code, conversation by conversation.

It represents a way of doing technology that serves community, not capital. A way of organizing that doesn’t copy the hierarchies of the world it wants to change, but experiments with new ways of deciding, working, and living together.

For the Undervan project, this hackathon is an example of what “mental decolonization” looks like in practice: building free tools, collective governance, shared infrastructure. Not from theory, but from the mud, the code, the shared meals, and the long conversations.