Feed Kindness

Inspiration

Only harassment is a serious problem that needs solving. We believe technology can help in making the internet a kinder place.

What it does

Feed kindness sends positive affirmations to users who tweet #feedkindness or #feed_kindness. If you tweet #feedkindness and mention another user both you and the mentioned user will receive a positive affirmation.

How we built it

We built it strictly locally through ruby using the twitter API. In future we would like to implement chron tasking as well as move the app to a server so that it can run continuously.

Challenges we ran into

In attempting to automate our twitter bot and test the code we became locked out of the twitter API. To over come this we created a second twitter account and altered the authentication information in our code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that our bot works at all! We had only one team member with a technical background and that team member is only now taking their first ever computer science course. Technical problems were a huge hurdle for us.

We are also extremely proud of the content we have created in our video and our idea over all. While we were aware of more technically complex possibilities we feel that we have created the most simple and elegant solution to the problem of online harassment.

What we learned

We learned to err on the side of caution when it comes to testing our code in a live environment. We also learned a great deal about cyber bullying, online harassment, and what it means to participate in a hackathon.

What's next for Feed Kindness

Next for Feed Kindness is migrating the app to rails and then eventually heroku or AWS for deployment. We would also like to add additional functionality to the app. This would include but not be limited to sending messages anonymously (or not) and an incentive system for promoting kindness by giving users 'points' for sending messages of kindness.

Built With

• ruby