GetTogethr

Inspiration

Our team is composed of engineering science students with a passion for software engineering. We believe that the increased reliance on virtual communication services during the COVID19 pandemic has generated new business opportunities for innovative software solutions that help people to generate meaningful social connections. Our desire to contribute to these innovations has led us to develop GetTogethr, an application which helps organizations put together virtual social events for employees to discover their common interests and build new relationships.

What it does

GetTogethr is used to pair employees at virtual social events into breakout rooms with colleagues that share similar interests and hobbies. By asking employees to generate a short list of their interests, GetTogethr utilizes semantic text analytics through the DandelionAPI to correlate interests between employees and suggest engaging groupings to organization administrators. Administrators can specify the number of desired breakout rooms and participants per room, review employee groupings and send employees to their group breakout rooms with leading team communication clients (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, Google Meet).

How we built it

We built this project as a web application using React and Node.js. Our project features two core front page panels: (1) an employee used Interest Form and (2) an administrator used Dashboard. Our Interest Form page is used to collect employee interests which are then processed by our back-end to generate employee breakout room groupings. Our back-end utilizes the semantic text analytics software Dandelion to determine the similarity between employee submitted interests. A pairing algorithm is then used to find the breakout room topics and groupings which maximize the shared interests between employees. These groupings are automatically loaded into the administrator’s Dashboard where event settings can be specified and groupings can be reviewed before setting groups up in team communication clients.

Challenges we ran into

We were challenged early on by the potential for employees to have uncommon interests without explicit crossover with other employees. This problem prompted us to research semantic text analytics, a method of correlating the similarity between words with a numerical coefficient. With this analytic method we are able to pair together employees with different but similar interests into the group most compatible with them. We utilized DandelionAPI for this purpose, which can compare text bodies and relate their similarity but not individual words. To use DandelionAPI to compare individual interest words we mapped interest words to their encyclopedia definitions and used these definition texts to compute their similarity coefficient.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is proud of our accomplishment in designing this software project and implementing it as a proof-of-concept with the DandelionAPI over a short weekend time period. We believe in the value of this software design and think its core function is currently absent in the marketplace. With the time and resources to fully realize this design’s potential we believe organizations would benefit when facilitating team building and organizational loyalty by supporting employees in building genuine relationships with each other.

What we learned

This project taught us more about the complexities of correlating the similarity of terms along with the conditions that help employees discover common interests and build new relationships. We identified that there is a barrier for employees to discover common interests between themselves virtually in an organization without the ease of small talk and individual conversation that in-person social events facilitate. It can be challenging for employees to build new relationships virtually in breakout rooms without “icebreaker” topics they can reliably make conversation about. This realization was the motivation for GetTogethr.

Business viability

GetTogethr is targeted to human resource departments trying to plan social events (for e.g. with new interns at a company) that facilitate relationship building between employees and for team managers looking to encourage team building and organizational loyalty. This software solution is applicable to any company in the business sector that values team work and company culture. The software would be sold to companies as a renewable service subscription with regular updates to support new team communication clients and to add administrative controls tailored to company needs.

What's next for GetTogethr

With more time and resources to spend on this project we would focus on the addition of more administrator event controls and the beautification of the user interface. For the purpose of this hackathon we prioritized a functional design to offer a proof-of-concept for this software. A more modern, aesthetic interface design would increase its business appeal which makes this a high priority for next steps on this project.

Built With

• css
• javascript
• json
• react
• semantic