[inopinatus]

Well, I also did actually read the article, and the contest website and even the explanatory PDF and I took away a different message. It doesn't appear to specifically require that the result is a network connection in the sense of an IP packet forwarding layer. They're looking, I think, for a services-equivalent outcome for temporarily or permanently disconnected communities, one that is at least gatewayed to the Internet. So the term "decentralise" is perhaps poorly chosen, it seems to me they're hoping for application services (probably including web requests) in a disconnected and/or ad-hoc mesh mode.

My gut feeling is that to create a long-term platform (rather than a point solution) we'd have to refit many extant application protocol stacks with CRDTs and reconceptualised crypto. Although for this contest I'd be imagining something less advanced, maybe a drone-based 4G hotspot loitering over communities with a copy of Wikipedia, a camera trained to detect signs of urgent distress, and a store-and-forward microblogging service like some automated Postman.

Someone should call Elon Musk and Vint Cerf about it, too, because I see many similarities between the outcomes for this and the outcomes for the Interplanetary Internet [1] which has been an ongoing research effort for years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet