Harshita Gupta
In the Harvard College Office of BGLTQ Student Life's (QuOffice's) "Thinking Queerly" workshops, the facilitators prompt participants to interrogate ways in which they've learned about normative gender and sexuality across their lifetimes. To this end, we lead two "timeline activities" which currently waste a lot of paper and are cumbersome to digitize and commit to institutional memory. For my final project, I would like to build a distributed system that facilitates the activity during the workshop and allows students to participate anonymously via their smartphones.
Traditionally, the activity is conducted by handing out post-its to the attendees and asking them to write down, on individual post-its, specific moments during which they learned about gender and sexuality across their lifetime. They then stick their 6-10 post-its on a whiteboard, plotting each post-it along a timeline of their life. Once participants are done adding their post-its to the timeline, the group gathers around the timeline and looks for trends/similarities across post-its. This process is currently very awkward and cumbersome since the entire group can't gather around the whiteboard and view the material in any efficient way.
The proposed system would be a mobile and desktop compatible web app. It would offer the following functions:
- Allow QuOffice staff to create a "session" via an admin panel. The session would specify the question that participants must respond to via post-its, and specify the unit of measurement for the timeline's timeseries: a numerical age or MM/YY date, to allow for different types of timeline questions like "How has your group represented gender and sexuality over the course of the calendar year" (a MM/YY timestamp) versus "how have you learned about gender and sexuality across your life" (a numerical age timestamp).
- Allow participants to contribute to a specific session over a mobile-compatible interface, type the content for their post-its, and plot each post-it along a timeline.
- Have a well-designed view that visually represents the timeline and that can be projected on a screen at the front of the room. This view would live-update as post-its are submitted.
- Have a mobile-compatible version of the same visual timeline so that users can examine the curated submissions more closely on their own phones and scroll through them.
- Allow the QuOffice to "close" the session via the admin panel so that it doesn't accept any more submissions.
- Work on a limited budget: either use Azure's services that are free for students or constrain the budget to a specific amount. Warn the QuOffice when the storage usage is nearing a budget constraint.
- Allow the QuOffice to export past session data as a CSV via the admin panel and delete it from the server to free up space for future sessions.
- Bonus: allow the QuOffice to optionally enable "monitoring", so that submitted post-its only appear on the visual timeline after they're screened by another staffer in live-time. Since we sometimes conduct workshops with groups that aren't ready to maturely engage with our content, we would want to preserve the integrity of the space by not letting the digital medium's distance enable people's irresponsible sides.
- Working on a limited financial budget. This will require:
- Finding an Azure/AWS/Google App Engine configuration that takes advantage of our @college email perks as much as possible.
- Constraining the app's resource usage to work within the free account's constraints. (primarily storage, since workshops only have about 40 users at once)
- Concurrency: participants will be adding content to the timeline simultaneously during the course of the session. The system should handle this gracefully and update the live timeline gracefully as well.
- Immediate consistency: since this is a live workshop, the data will all be centralized and pushed to all users immediately.
- Live updates: we will need to implement an efficient delta updates scheme so that the live-updating of the timeline is quick and not a drain on the network, since workshops can often end up with > 100 post-its. Sending all of the timeline to each participant's phone on a "refresh" would not scale well.
- Support multiple simultaneous workshops: as the QuOffice hopes to expand its offerings, if we do multiple simultaneous workshops during Opening Days, the system should support traffic to multiple active sessions at once.
- Anonymity: due to the sensitive nature of the content being collected, we should ensure that no IP information/identifying information is retained about submissions.
Disclaimer: As you might have guessed, Harshita is an intern at the QuOffice, and is excited to prototype this at work. She isn't getting paid to work on the project, but hopes to use it on the job at the office starting in the Fall. She hopes that that's okay!
Questions for Professor Waldo: is this appropriately scoped to be one person's final project, or is it too much/too little? Are one-person groups okay?