#MeToo hack follow up

a day of social hacking

This post is a follow up on a previous post from last year about the metoo hack

So on the 3rd of February the #metoo hack kicked off with a one-day event to formalize ideas that by the use of technology will help to prevent discrimination in society. It was a great day and it was inspiring to hear about all the different ideas that ranged from a voice analyser that will analyse who talks (most) in a meeting, to chrome plugin for unbiased recruitment, to corporate manuals and our own submission a bot to report incidents.

now it is up to individual project teams to take this further if they think that they have an idea that will fly. And there is already a follow up event planned in a couple of months to help with just this.

our idea:

There are several reporting applications but they are a bit limiting in that they are usually form based. Our solution was a “bot” focusing on schools (but could be applicable for corporate organisations as well) that can ask relative questions to ascertain information about an event. At this stage the user is completely anonymous which we felt was important to encourage usage. If the set of questions result in a user filing a claim/report the user would have to add some information to give more of a context to where this had occurred, for example what school and in what year they are.

This will be stored and schools (or organisations) can get a “real world view” of what is happening in their school, surrounding areas, nationally and globally.

Using a bot also make integrations with other systems more easily achieved.

our solution:

• web app (angular js) for chat client
• web service using Microsoft Bot framework
• Slack integration

Using Microsoft bot framework you get a whole framework that can respond to different types of user interactions. You can respond to simple messages, display forms, complex dialogues and rich content. And bot framework connectors will handle it all for your connected channel such as slack, web and facebook’s messenger

for a next stage:

• using a cognitive solution for more intelligent answers e.g (Microsoft cognitive services)
• adding translation support so the back-end would work in say, English but responds in the language of the user (this is because loads of the cognitive services are still very limited in what natural language they can process)
• an administrative site for organisations to view incidents.

All code will be made available on GitHub (disclaimer if the organizers will let us)

find out more about metoo hack