CONCEPT DESCRIPTION:

Our problem was to get people stuck in the world of the Internet out of their homes to participate in various activities. We also tried to alleviate the growing fragmentation of modern society by creating a platform to help people connect with their neighbours in the local area.

The specific target group is internet-active introverts, however, we tried to design the system in such a way as to attract people of all sorts. The idea is to create an app that everyone could use, and the initial marketing would be towards “the extroverts” in the local geographic area, as they could then effectively spread the app to their more introverted peers. We thought it would also be helpful to get local organizations, for example youth activity centers like Happi, involved in the creation of larger-scale events and spreading of the app. For them the value of the app would be as a method of effectively announcing events for potentially interested target groups.

The main purpose of the app is to function as a platform for easy creation and discovery of nearby small-scale events. The idea is to make it as easy as possible for people to find interesting activities on the one hand and to find people to join their own activities on the other hand. If a game of basketball lacks a few members, one could simply send a call for participants in the app and get some random interested players from the vicinity to join.

What is the special value of this app compared to competing services like Foursquare and Eventbrite? First of all, our focus is on micro-scale events and activities organized by people for the people; the competing apps are more focused on large organizations. On the other hand, one could certainly use existing platforms such as Facebook or WhatsApp to create micro-announcements, but these would be limited to one’s friends. Our app seeks to connect people in the local area regardless of their prior acquaintance. Lastly, our app is more effective than mere posters or other public announcements, as a centralized online platform makes it simple to find interested people, as well as for them to discover your event.

PROTOTYPING:

We started work by producing a minimal paper prototype that guided the later production of the mock-up app. The purpose of this paper prototype for us was mainly to act as a channel of communication between the main innovators and the developers, and to help clarify our ideas of what we actually wanted to produce.

The paper prototypes turned out to be a tremendous help with the initial communication issues. Once we learned to speak a common language, and had some concrete drawings of what we were talking about, we worked together surprisingly well, but until then it was almost as if we were from different planets entirely.

Still, we eventually produced a mock-up application which will be described below.

TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION:

High-level architecture:

The “app” is for now implemented as a web-service; we plan to create an android wrapper app later on. The back-end is written in Java, and based on the Spring framework. The sites are dynamically generated with data from a JPA repository using Thymeleaf. We plan to eventually publish the beta version of the app on the Heroku platform. Right now we are in the pre-alpha stage.

Development tools:

• Java + NetBeans IDE
• Spring Framework
• Thymeleaf
• HTML5 front-end (Notepad++, GEdit)
• Tomcat Server
• Photoshop (?)
• Git + GitHub
• Slack

Stage of implementation:

Pre-Alpha. We got login, registration, logout, event creation and saving as well as user and event profiles working. Event deletion is partly working.

Satisfaction with choice of architecture:

At first, we tried to code everything from scratch, which led to incomprehensible initial configuration issues. We ended up wasting an entire day just trying to get the server-side code functioning at all. The front-end development continued meanwhile. Luckily we managed to find one of our team members’ old project that we could use as a working template to build upon during Sunday. After that, the coding was a breeze.

In the end we are happy with our choice of architecture due to the fact that the program was our own handiwork and is thus easy to extend in the future. While everything we did have time to implement may have been possible with existing frameworks such as WordPress or Joomla, we could have later run into issues with some of the planned features had we taken the easy route now. We do have plans to at least discuss developing this idea further, so having future proof code is definitely a plus.

Repository:

https://github.com/GloKnow/GloKnow

License:

GNU GPLv3, at least for now.

TEAM MEMBERS:

Jami Valorinta (Server-side programmer, innovator)

Ville-Matti Tanninen (Server-side programmer)

Jussi Paakkunainen (Front-end developer, artist)

Thuy Trang Dao (Project manager, writer)

Zahidul Khan (Original app idea, paper prototype)

Introduction of the team members

Anne, youth work professional

Tiina, artist

Jarkko Lagus, programmer

Lari Saukkonen, programmer

Jyri Saukkonen, programmer

Concept introduction

Idea was to rebrand volunteering work (in Finland) and to make an app that connects volunteers and organisations in a meaningful way. We decided to make platform to aggregate the supply and demand of voluntary work and change the overall attitude about voluntary work in finnish culture.

3 important user stories

Leevi:

Lifestyle: skater, lives with parents, doesn’t care so much about school, dreams making it in the skating business.

Attitude: free soul, doesn’t know yet what he wants to do in life, lives in the moment

Gain from voluventure: explore different kind of work possibilities, likes to work with children and other teens

Could have potential in youth work in the future

Anni:

Lifestyle: vegeterian, into arts, has strong opinions issues in society etc. goes to kallio school of arts, into acting etc.

Attitude: determinate young person with lots of optimistic dreams

Gain from voluventure: can have impact on society through own actions, likes animals etc. so could help in rescuing animals and so on..

Mikko:

Lifestyle: parkour instructor and a professional stuntman, urban person who likes to participate in all kinds of charity events and happenings around the town

Attitude: Fearless opportunist who likes to try out new ideas.

Gain from voluventure: Can make, organize and participate in volunteer events.

What did we learn about the service design process?

We learned how important it is for a successful service design process to include the professionals from the specific area of expertise to be able to understand the underlying problem. When designing a platform for young people it is not enough to have the information and means how to technically produce the generic product but how to make it adapt the specific field of business.

What became your solution architecture?

MEAN-stack: MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, Node.js

Heroku

MEAN-stack and Heroku were already familiar with us so that was a natural solution for our project’s starting point. We didn’t have any major setbacks using the stack and we could operate it efficiently. Overall we recommend the MEAN-stack and Heroku for anyone already familiar with the technologies but if starting to learn them in a hackathon-like fast pace environment is not advised because they take some time to master.

What development tools did you use?

Hipster logo generator Amazing professional tool for all your graphical needs.(http://www.hipsterlogogenerator.com) Forget about photoshop and use this instead.

GIMP, photo editor

Webstorm, IDE

Sublime text, text editor

What advice would you give for a person planning to participate SomeJam 2016?

In our opinion SomeJam is more about innovation and prototyping than just hardcore coding in a dark room without communication. We think that for success it is essential for the group to have an open communication between software developers and other professionals.

Want to hang out but don’t know your city? Let us introduce you to “Almost 50 Shades of Your City”!

During the weekend we were lucky enough to participate in SomeJam 2015. An event where you are among great minds. We had 48 hours to implement an idea which should help people, specially the youth. Beside all the intensity to implement something useful in 48 hours we also had much fun and great food. It all started when the three of us couldn’t find any group in line with our interests which lead to forming a team ourselves.  Since we were all computer scientists, Martin Radev, Farbod Faghihi and Ankit Kariryaa,  we wanted to use advanced knowledge in computer science and not only a normal service.  Since we were interested in Location-based Services and Machine Learning concepts we came up with “Almost 50 Shades of Your City”.

There are times that one is lonely and cannot find their desired places to go and like minded groups and related events are not found easily. As a new student you want to know more about different regions in the city in order to find desired places to hang out or as a person who is moving to the city because of his or her new job you want to know which regions contain events in line with your interests. As an agency working for improving the city, you want to know which parts of the city are deprived of cultural, technological or social event, so that we can work on these areas and making such events available to a large population. So we decided to get all the information from the services that organizes event such as Eventbrite and Meetup to make people more familiar with their city. The idea was to find out that what kind of events are held at which regions of the city. We have an intelligent user interface that provide the user with different levels of abstraction relative to the area that the user is viewing in the Google Maps. So as the user zoom in or zoom out we would classify different regions on the map into corresponding type of event that is happening there. For this goal we use clustering methods such as K-Nearest-Neighbors.

So here you can see three different figures, each with a different level of detail. The first one shows the Europe which we can see that the dominant event is business. In the next figure we went further and you can see a view of Berlin which is interesting because we can see the we have three separate areas with different kind of events. It shows that in the south west we have technical events while in the center the dominant type of event is business and finally in the south east music events dominates the events in that area. You can go even further, in the third figure you can see one of the Berlin neighborhoods with lower level of abstraction.

We divided the challenge into 3 sub tasks, Martin was responsible for gathering data about events around the world, Ankit was responsible for the clustering of the data  and Farbod took up the job of visualizing the data. We went through different event hosting sites and decided to use www.eventbrite.com as our first source of events and then expand further if time would allow. For clustering the data, we decided to use,  K-Nearest-Neighbors clustering algorithm, here class labels are determined by a majority vote in its K-Nearest-Neighbors. In this way we were able to determine the most popular event in a certain area. For visualization, Google Maps API was selected and marker were used to display the finding of the clustering method.

We implemented the back-end i.e. the web scraping technique and clustering in Java. The front-end was implemented in JavaScript. We used github.com for source code management. We are happy with our choices as it worked out very well in the end (Yes we were one of the winners! 😀 ). We really enjoyed participating this event and would like to greatly thank everyone responsible in organizing the event.

What?

Somejam, a coding event where the task is to create an app that benefits youth in someway. In 48 hours our team was able to create a communication tool that would allow a young person to have a private chat with a youth worker or other person capable of helping. Our teams was quite large and consisted of (from left to right):

• Programmer, designer, innovator – Henri Malkki
• Programmer, solution architect Felix Lindholm
• Programmer, designer – Jonne Huotari
• Designer, programmer – Perttu Lähteenlahti
• Programmer, designer – Zita Němečková
• Programmer, designer – Yan He
• Youth worker – Maija Pihlaja
• Youth worker – Liisa Kurtti

Concept

Liisa told us about her goal to make important information for young people more easy to access because they usually get it from wrong or outdated sources like friends or family.At Friday night we talked about some kind of Emergency button that would let you call a youth worker at anytime you wanted. On Saturday we expanded it to chat platform that would be 24/7 available, easy to use and let you talk one on one with someone who have correct and up-to-date information that young person needs. We wanted to create trustworthy chat environment so we decided that someone who is there to give advice should provide their name, photo and some additional information about themselves. This way young people can know who they are talking to and they can trust them. There are many chats but none is open for long or provide any information about people you can talk to.

Our goal was to create some basic prototype that Liisa could show to her employer so they can use to improve the chat in Netnappi in Oulu that they want to renew in near future.

Technical stuff

Fact was that some software company would make the app from scratch when it would be launched, so we focused on making working demo instead of a complete product. We used nodejs and socket.io to create the software, because they were fast to implement and easy to use. This helped us to focus on the usability and design.

Final solution architecture

JavaScript
HTML5, CSS3
Bootstrap
font-awesome
node.js
socket.io
Iframe-technology

Development tools

Sublime text
Vim
Pen and paper

We think that nodejs and socket.io were quite easy to get started with, but deep understanding can take some time of course. All other technologies were useful and we can recommend those too. We can also truly recommend using Sublime text and Vim for all the editing needs. We used Slack for communication and sharing links. To put shortly, Slack is IRC with GUI and file sharing. It was great because not everyone uses IRC.

Conclusion

The final product met our expectations and we were very happy about it. Overall the weekend was great experience for all of us and provided everyone of us some new. It was super fun to work as a team and create a working service concept prototype.

It is great that our work can hopefully benefit young people some day.

A Great Weekend

The weekend started on Thursday (13th March 2014) by a series of talks by some young entrepreneurs at the Linus Torvalds auditorium (Exactum building, Kumpula campus of University of Helsinki). We learnt some key facts and points about lean startups and also characteristics and goals of prototypes.

The Joy Began

Next day (Friday), SomeJam hackathon officially began at the Happi Youth Center, with some initial speeches about the fundamentals and practicalities. Then we teamed up, and the organizers started to ignite the creativity rocket of participants by showing some objects and asking us to guess what it is, and how it can be used. Then we started to think about and come up with some ideas to solve the loneliness problem of youth. After some minutes of brainstorming in groups, all groups presented their ideas.

Finally, we had a freestyle opportunity to come up with some novel ideas and present them. First, I came up with a great novel idea (related to youth) and presented it, but since we only had 48 hours to build the prototype, I thought more time is needed to build a working prototype of my idea. Then I noticed another great idea proposed by Maninder Singh, and I joined the team. Then Lei Wang and another anonymous teammate joined our team.

The idea was to provide a service to lonely people and those who are new in a city, especially youth, to find and join events based on their interests, make new friends, and have fun. After joining the team, we started to discuss about the details, and we came to an agreement for the programming language and technologies we wanted to use. We chose the Grail framework because we all knew Java, and Grails was a great framework for Java programmers, because it is relatively easy to learn, developers can develop their solution quickly using scaffolding facilities, and it’s almost hassle-free. I already knew Spring framework and Maven, and it helped me to learn the new framework rapidly.

Welcome to The Dragon Team!

Friday night, we started to brainstorm more and then collaborate to draw our initial model on a big piece of paper. We managed to come up with a model that satisfied our initial requirements. It’s worth to mention that this model might not be complete in the first iteration and can be improved over iteration (like in lean and agile processes), but we tried to consider and model the fundamental building blocks accurately.

We created a paper prototype demonstrating the features and functionality of our intended service. We also created a central repository on Github to facilitate our teamwork for implementing the service initially as a web-based service. Since the IntellijIDEA IDE offers out of the box support (code completion, server management, etc.) for Grails, we used that IDE for our project. After working till 4 AM on the backend and a part of frondend, we left Happi to have some rest at home.

On Saturday, we get together again at midday because we had to pitch and defend our idea and project in a tough jury meeting.

Fortunately, we managed to defend our idea, and of course we got some precious suggestion and advises that we considered for improving our service. After the meeting, we continued to work till late night.

Time to Wrap Up

On Sunday, we got prepared to present our software product (working prototype), and I believe we did it pretty good. You can watch the footage on YouTube.

Eventually, the amazing weekend came to an end, but the inspiration did not. I learnt a lot in the first SomeJam.

The Guru!

I believe the following advices may come in handy:

1. Don’t miss this kind of events! When I got the email regarding this course, I thought I’m not going to participate because I was busy, but it turned out to be one of the best courses I have ever had.

2. It’s great to have some novel ideas to solve our problems, but since these kind of hackathons are quite short, bear this in mind that you must be able to implement a prototype in a short time. So don’t consider ideas that need a week or two to build even a prototype.

3. Although prototypes are there to quickly show the concept, but they should impress/persuade the investors/partners/business angles for investing in your idea. So take this into account before going to the pitching meeting.

4. If you didn’t face a good reaction/feedback from the potential investors, don’t be frustrated, the objective of a prototype is to assess if the idea is worth to put more effort in order to implement it. Instead, think about other novel ideas.

5. You can predict the reaction/feedback of your potential investor to some extent. Try to ask yourself:

– How are we going to have our first user/customer?

– How can we extend our user base, and how are we going to keep them motivated such that they continue to use our service?

– What value(s) does our service offer to users?

-Can we imagine of a Persona for our users?

– Is there any similar service out there? If yes, how does our service differ from those similar ones?

– Does the project need significant investment to set up? What about the maintenance costs?

– Can we generate a revenue stream?

I learnt all of these in this intensive event. Thus, in the end, I would like to express my gratitude to dear Hanna Mäenpää, dear Emilia Hjelm, dear Marcus Lundqvist, other organizers, and my teammates for creating this great experience.

HappyHangup is a platform which provide solution to the lonely people in a country. For a new person in a country or lonely people in country, its hard to find friends. We provide group activities to involve people with others. Its going to be unique platform where youth organization can generate innovative solutions and execute those innovative ideas by involving youth of the country. It provide a unique interface where youth can interact with each other and find new friends. It a platform to have a fun whiling hanging and being a part of learning environment.

This idea is come up by our group member Singh Maninder.  The following paper is his initial idea. After Maninder‘s presentation,  Javad Boh, Jannis Seemann and I joined the group.

The following chart is the Singh Maninder‘s original idea.

Then, we start to figure out how to go specific on this idea together. The following figure is our discussion result about what specific feature we need to realize.

The final presentation of our project on Sunday is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp4MzFrpw88

Github repository: https://github.com/jsmunich/HappyHangup

Open source license: MIT

We use the grails for web development framework and gsp for front end design.

The following pictures is our website ‘s snapshots.

Main page of our work.

Interests list of users

coming activities list

involved Company list

Details of Activity

We have a really happy experience together to complete the whole project, and we also want to get comment from users.

By Mukesh Thakur  from LetsDoIT Team

As a developer i would say it is really important for a programmer to take part in this kind of event not only to challenge their programming skills but also to challenge their social skill and to get out of their comfort zone to make some innovative project in very short period of time. The most important thing in this kinda of event is communication and co-operation between team member to solve the problems and get things done. And of course chatting with other people is also important since u will get to meet new interesting people which is so much fun.

Choosing tools for software development could be tool, one is comfortable with or one is eager to learn. As for our team , we decided to use Ruby on Rails , since it is much more faster for protyping and Appgyver for initial protoyping( desgining ). Apart form this we sketched on the paper for modelling and we sometime argued to get to the conclusion which is very good. We used Git as base code repo since everyone of us knew git and it is super easy to use and maintain, share code.

Something on should remember in this kind of event is , it is team work , so all the work should not be done by one team member but work should be divided among all team member , nobody should be left out. Dont be afraid to speak on stage , it is not that difficult . One practical issue i would say is remember to sleep at some point or productivity decreases and yes remember your brush if u are not going home.

It was quite interesting to attend SomeJam and to innovate things as a practical developer. The working environment was quite enjoyable and comfortable, with a lot of space.  Staffs were quite considerate and the food was nice.

Our schedule for the SomeJam -event was generally like this, on Friday evening we first had an introduction to the event and self-introduction of everyone. Then we were randomly divided into groups and had games to inspire us to solve problems. On Saturday afternoon we had our first pitch with board members and got feedback to improve our future work. Then on Sunday afternoon, we did the final pitch among all the other teams.

In terms of team work,  we all thought that our team worked really well together. All of us were developers so we were instantly on the same page in terms of what was doable in the scope of 48 hours . We also had similar ideas about how we should start implementing the project. After the initial planning phase we decided to divide into two groups, so that we could have a nice mock-up done for Saturday’s board meeting but also immediately start work on the Rails prototype.

It was quite useful and interesting to pitch, as majority of our group members didn’t have real pitching experience yet. We gained valuable experience on how to form a good idea and try to sell it to business investors. Working as group and solving a problem together in real life was very interesting. We all learned a lot not and hoped to enjoy the next SomeJam event.