Diversic

Inspiration

The Inspiration for this project came from the lack of focus on overcoming issues that a diverse workplace might cause. While the arguments in favor of creating diverse teams are always increasing, we noticed that there is not as much discussion about how this could be realistically implemented.

What it does

The main goal is to avoid conflict on the workplace. Our product does this by keeping members of a company/team informed about specific preferences regarding culture, identity and more without being forced to disclose personal information

How we built it

What we have right now is more of a design prototype, and only a slight part of the actual code. The functionality was made using the java swing GUI, while the design was created using JustInMind. Diversic has the general structure of a computer application though can currently only be implemented locally.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled a bit at first to come up with a concrete solution to solve issues in diverse teams due to problems often being internal. As such, we decided to focus on finding ways to minimize external problems that can be easily avoidable if people tried to get to know each other's backgrounds. On a more physical standpoint, this is my team's first hackathon so it took quite a bit of time getting acquainted with the system and learning to adapt quickly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We had a group of great people and were able to communicate and work well despite the challenges. We were able to combine our ideas into something tangible. We were also a diverse team, which showed a real life implementation of how diversity covers blind spots and makes for a more well rounded product, as well as having direct input about possible issues in the workplace similar to that in university as international students ourselves.

What we learned

We learned quite a bit about workplace diversity and how much of an issue it still is today. We learned that oftentimes, a lack of diversity causes a problem with blind spots in products, a lack of focus in products targeted towards minority groups, and other issues in the productivity of the company. We also learned that a large portion of this problem originates from a lack of communication and understanding of one another.

What's next for Diversic

We would like to create a fully working prototype that will be online and might be able to be integrated in major communications platforms. This way, people will be able to easily share information about their preferences among people. We would also implement a database, something that was not possible during this hackathon, to better manage the data being stored. In this implementation, we would also like for the application to be able to show preferences to only selected people as well.