Conflict Hacking Guide

The Vision. When people are experiencing a conflict with someone else, they often feel alone and don't know what to do or to whom to go for help. The Conflict Hacking Guide is a starting point for them. Whether it is a conflict at home, work, or anywhere in between, the Conflict Hacking Guide will triage the conflicts and point people to resources and people that can provide helpful information, coaching, legal advice, or even legal representation. It would help with resources for interpersonal conflicts, family and work conflicts, and even when suddenly faced with a subpoena, summons or threat of a lawsuit.

The Prototype. At least that is the vision. We started out strong, but ran into some speedbumps. Our goal was a very simple, web-based question and answer tree design. We used QNA Markup and started developing the content. Jim developed the initial structure for the tree and the conflict coaching branches, while Tom developed the legal assistance branches. Ket was developing the site, UI, and plugging the text content into the QNA Markup. Late in the day of the hackathon, about an hour before final submission, our tree cracked. To get the UI to work again in time to submit something for the judges, we had to amputate large branches (think the fight with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail...).

The Need for Iteration. That is where we are now. The judges' questions pointed to a need to rethink the project somewhat, specifically how we get people to use the Guide in the first place. Definitely, getting people to the information is an important factor that would need to be included in the redesign of the Guide (or something similar).