PPLOFMONTREAL

Inspiration

In an inter-connected world, there is a surprising lack of support among peers to share happiness, sadness or any other range of emotion. Just like Forrest Gump sharing his box of chocolates with strangers while connecting with them, this type of personal relationship is completely removed in the modern world. This type of support is lacking at the local city level and also on the online level; there is no resource that provides positive support without a chance of receiving negative criticism.

With STM integrating high tech touchscreens on their bus stations, we believe this is the perfect opportunity to change them from a simple interactive map to an integrated communication system that provides support at the local and global level in Montreal. We are hoping to knit the city's citizens closer together emotionally, while reducing the amount of negativity on the internet.

What it does

Using a web interface that fits the STM's touchscreen interface, the application will have a user submit what they are feeling, with a person who is waiting for the bus being able to answer them with a message of support. The application can be used from station to station touchscreen, from online to station touchscreen, or from an online website to another online website. Serious messages will be directed differently with a hotline support and flagged at the administrator level, and negative/explicit/offensive messages will be ultimately removed completely.

The messages (regardless if they were filtered or not) will all go through a cloud database so that the messages can be analyzed at the city level, at the online anonymity level and offline anonymity level to provide valuable data to the city and the #hackharassment in order to further improve data analytics to combat harassment locally and online. The data can be exported to determine the overall sentiment of the Montreal population on a daily, monthly or yearly level if need-be.

How we built it

VueJS, Firebase

Challenges we ran into

There were a series of challenges that we faced due to our lack of coding skills in the team(2 hackers with no coding education). Furthermore, the entire team had no experience with Firebase nor any database skill-sets. Therefore, we had to learn how to construct a cloud database from scratch, and faced numerous challenges, including the fact that we were unable to retrieve data from the database. This was fixed with mentor support pointing us to the right direction, and further troubleshooting and understanding context and asynchronous data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In descending order of the accomplishments we are proud of:

Figuring out how to create a cloud database
Developing an idea that can make Montreal, and the world a more positive place
Hacking Harassment
Working in a multi-university and multi-degree team
Good time management
Ability to sleep comfortably with just a chair and a table and not having back pain the next day
Working effectively despite minimal sleep

What we've learned

Not only did we learn more about database structures, context, asynchronous data, VueJS, and cloud databases, but most importantly, we've learned how to work effectively in a team that have unique attributes and skills. The most important to the team, is that we learned to have even more fun with hacking despite the time crunch and the lack of sleep; it ultimately created blossoming friendships that can stand the test of time.

What's next for PPLOFMONTREAL

With our pledge to #HackHarassment, we aim to implement more unique ways in reducing negativity online and locally, and reduce overall harassment. We believe it is entirely possible to pitch this idea to integrate with STM's systems; it increases interactivity with their touchscreen systems and provide macro benefits to the city. Furthermore, this can be expanded to different types of database structures in a more global level and with our filtering system, we sincerely believe we can construct a system that produces valuable data for the city and for #hackharassment, while lending a hand to the people in need.