In person at RRC
- in person at the Rideau-Rockcliffe Community Resource Centre (RRCRC)
- The team discussed ideas for the Hack the Divide hackathon, including designing a potential application, continuing work on the existing blog app, or building a new app that integrates user-level features. The group also introduced the “quorum sensing” app concept to assess community mood and uncover local consensus, and the team discussed using metrics to indicate community health, and proposed an app for facilitating productive conversations.
- Given team skillsets, the hackathon is a good opportunity to prototype a product.
- Possible Hack the Divide project – Quorum Sensing App: Designed to go beyond simple voting to assess community mood and consensus, functioning as an “opinion thermostat.” This app could use AI for sentiment analysis of discussions or leverage existing open-source tools like Polis to identify opinion clusters from short text statements and agreement reactions to them. The goal of this application is to help communities map their collective thoughts and find common ground.
- Community Box Scale Constraints: The team discussed setting limits for the “community in a box” to ensure it remains manageable with volunteers and works well technologically. They suggested a target of no more than 100 users during beta testing, allowing for support on hardware like a Raspberry Pi.
- Ecology of tools and data sharing: The concept of an “ecology of tools” or “ecology of services” was introduced, where data across different services would overlap. This would require a protocol or infrastructure for data sharing, allowing information like contacts in a “yellow pages” service to link with a “community asset map.” The discussion also touched on how institutions have flows of people interconnected with businesses and programs, suggesting a need for a flexible system that recognizes individuals’ multiple affiliations.
- Reinventing the Feed: The discussion explored reinventing the concept of a “feed,” comparing it to a basic version of email but as a foundation for a community tool, distinct from current social media platforms. The goal is to centralize and customize a user’s feed from multiple communities and interests, addressing the fragmentation caused by checking multiple social apps. This approach would leverage open protocols like RSS to enable new platforms to be built on top of the system.
Civic Tech Ottawa Kick off
Civic Tech Ottawa: Connecting and Collaborating
We recently met with many amazing people at Civic Tech Ottawa. Max and Rafi shared our vision for the “community in a box” concept, outlining the scope for this weekend’s Hack the Divide Hackathon. We were thrilled to see a strong interest and appreciation for our vision. A significant number of volunteers expressed their eagerness to help, and we’re now focused on providing clear direction for their contributions. To further this, a product design call has been scheduled for Thursday, October 25th, to develop concrete plans.
Hackathon – HackTheDivide2025
Internal demo of progress during the hackathon.
Final Presentation
All the code can be found at https://gitlab.com/rafi_khan/community-in-a-box
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