Gather

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Inspiration

Throughout the past few years, we have seen a huge need for ways to have impactful conversations with others without creating more division. Although we know that social progress is sparked by intentional conversations, on many occasions these conversations have led to tense arguments that only cause people to put up more walls and become less open to having deep discussions. Our team wanted to help people have meaningful conversations so that we can continue the progress we've seen our society take recently. We were inspired by an event in Louisville, KY called The Big Table, which is a giant potluck where people are encouraged to have meaningful conversations with strangers about social issues while sharing a meal. We then used a TED Talk by Priya Parker to learn more about the principles of transformative gatherings and decided that it was a great resource for people to use in their daily lives.

What it does

Gather is an app that is used to give people resources on how to have transformative gatherings, which are gatherings that seek to have lasting impacts on their participants in a way that does not lead to great divide. Within the app, users can find information on what transformative gatherings are, answers to common questions and misconceptions, tips on how to apply the principles in your daily life, and links to more resources about transformative gatherings. We provided links to TEDTalks, idea boards, and other websites that can help anyone plan more meaningful events to get people talking to each other in a positive and non-confrontational way.

How we built it

We began building WireFrames through Canva in order to plan out the design for the app. Through a mix of flutter and dart, we created our design. In order to depict an accurate user experience, we created an android and iOS emulator. We divided up the pages and used GitHub to collaborate.

Challenges we ran into

We had little knowledge of flutter, so we had issues with syntax. We chose to use Flutter because Flutter is something 2 of us had tried many years ago and our experience with it was subpar to say the least. Now that we have had some years of coding under our belt and the documentation for Flutter has gotten better, we decided to shoot our shot at the language one more time in hopes of developing an app easily for Android and iOS devices. It was a bit of a personal challenge. I'd say that this project is a success :)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

FINALLY LEARNING HOW TO USE FLUTTER!!!!

What we learned

We had two new hackers use GitHub. While investigating resources to put into the app, we ourselves learned about transformative gatherings and its importance.

What's next for Gather

Before we got started, we created wireframes for each of the pages that we wanted to have on this application. For those who are examining this project, or those who want to go improve upon this app, the wireframes that in the GitHub repository give you a clear vision of what the end goal is. We would like to improve both the UI and UX of the design, to give the users a more pleasant experience while using the app. There are also a lot of improvements that could be made to the accessibility aspects of the app, such as ensuring that the fonts are all compatible with screen readers and providing alternative captions for all of the images on our app.

We would also like the expand the app with a lot more research about transformative gatherings, to both improve the information we are sending out, and to provide more external resources to the users through the Links tab. One area we definitely would like to provide more information on is the differences in transformative gatherings in the workplace versus among friends and family, and more resources for how this can be applied in virtual meetings. We also have a vision of adding in-app host support for those who wish to host a transformative gathering. This would be in the form of in-app activities that people can do to spark conversation in an impactful way, and ways our can cater to the specific needs of the gathering the user is hosting.