agora

agora's homepage, note the chrome extension activated at the top right bar (alt text: purple square with letter "a" logo)
agora's dashboard, with entertainment budget, Today's lessons, the Chrome extension and a notification
agora's logo

What it is 🕵️

A fully functional web application and Chrome extension that uses your web activity (with permission) to provide daily lesson plans, recommend entertainment budgeting to limit time spent with pop-up notifications, and a local cached tracker to ensure user privacy.

Inspiration ✨

Scroll to, not through, your future. In an era where doom scrolling has become a pervasive societal issue, negatively impacting mental well-being, and privacy tracking eroding personal freedoms, there was an urgent need for a transformative solution. Agora, homage to being an Ancient Greek term for open space used for intellectual and social gatherings, a platform that not only counters the mindless scrolling trend but also champions user privacy. The relentless pursuit of a more mindful, purposeful digital existence inspired agora's creation, aiming to foster positive, intentional living in an increasingly interconnected world.

What it does 💻

agora is a comprehensive platform that uses your web activity (with your explicit permission of course!) and provides tailored lesson plans as well as entertainment budgeting to help you manage a purposeful, balanced digital lifestyle. Both tools are supported by daily external notifications and a browser add-on.

It gives daily lesson plan recommendations for each user based on their search history, cached cookies and manually entered interests. Users can go into each bite-sized lesson that follows a four part structure. Our entertainment budget adopts a gradual approach, helping users responsibly manage their screen time without abrupt restrictions. It offers a step-by-step plan, promoting sustainable changes in digital habits, ensuring a balanced and mindful transition to a more intentional online experience.

Our framework encourages users to 🍎 LEARN 📝:

Leverage customization based on web activity to enable tailored experiences
Evaluate your time spent doom scrolling on entertainment apps
Address habits that are more likely to lead you into doom scrolling and time-wasting
Reap the benefits of varied learning content and respond to diverse content recommendations
Navigate your learning journey with agora

In addition to the web app, we have a functional Chrome add-on (second github repository). Using Redis and Chrome History API, we are able to use recent user activity and local cache to come up with topics of lessons to recommend. In addition this information is used to update the entertainment budget to track how much time is spent on social sites.

agora is more than a website or an add-on. agora is an experience to make it easy to learn the art of intentional living by seamlessly curating personalized lesson plans and guiding your digital experience. Fine-tuning your journey for a positive impact has never been easier.

How we built it 🔨

agora is based off of Cloudflare's Workers AI's databases to recommend curated lesson plans after prompting on web activity. The front-end is created using Chakra UI and open-source cache to ensure privacy and security is supported through Redis. Design and prototype were first created on pen and paper and then replicated in Chakra UI.

Challenges we ran into ⚠️

As a team we attempted to use many techstacks we had not previously known about and/or have never used before: Cloudflare's Worker AI, Redis and GoDaddy. As with any new techstack, there was a learning curve on a time constraint but we were able to overcome integration challenges and troubleshoot unfamiliar issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🏆

As eager learners, we take pride in having created a useful website that promotes commitments to education and utilizing the available web activity data to foster international living rather than leveraging the information for personalized ads.

On a more technical note we are also proud of being able to design an architecture that still values privacy with a short-term cache and allowing users to select which data they are comfortable with agora using.

What we learned 🏫

Balancing the utilization of web activity for personalization with robust privacy measures requires a combination of thorough research, continuous learning, and iterative prototyping to ensure user trust and data security.
Learning with unfamiliar tech stacks with a team in a collaborative coding environments required us to dive deep into documentation and brainstorm how to ensure the integrity of our architecture remained intact without losing our adaptability
Our first time learning how to plan the architecture for a browser extension and we were able to manage our time to achieve our goal hacking it
Hacking requires a balance of sleep 😴 and hard work 😤

What's next for agora 💭

Fine-tune our pop-up notifications that show up on external sites as reminders and recommendation
Incorporate more browser extensions in addition to our already existing Chrome extension for Safari, Firefox, and Edge
Incorporate job scheduling for daily lesson plans using Redis's job queue

References

To help with creating the Chrome add-on we used a tutorial found here.
Screentime images were sourced from our lovely community attending SheHacks+ 8 in person