Interwebs

Inspiration

When trying to come up with solutions to problems using forums like reddit, the general process of discussion using these forums are often filled with major arguments, seemingly irrelevant ideas, unsupported facts and no clear method to arrive at a solution. What we wanted to do was develop a new system which facilitates online discussion in a way that will lead to a potential solution.

What it does

The Interwebs system is designed to encourage people to solve problems using the method of 'parallel thinking' / De Bono's 6 thinking hat philosophy, as opposed to an argumentative philosophy which can lead to frustration, and has been proven not to be the most effective way of coming to a solution (especially in large groups).

Dr. Edward De Bono's 6 thinking hats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3ew6h5nHcc

The system's front end is a giant web of nodes, which can be manipulated through a myo band. Each node represents and idea that someone has added to the discussion. Each node is classified to one of De Bono's six thinking styles/'hats' (visually they are color coded).

This setup allows users to understand how the discussion has progressed overtime, and also encourages people to add information like 'intuition and emotion' (De Bono's red hat), which is valuable information that is not used in the classic argumentative philosophy. Also, the myo provides a interactive way to use the web.

Users are also able to easily rate how much they like a node, through simple myo gestures. As a node increases in popularity, the node gets bigger in size. When a chain of nodes start to become very dominant on the web, then that chain of ideas is the solution to the problem that was being discussed.

As Edward De bono once put it, if the system is used properly, the solution will present itself.

(NOTE: A myo script was developed which allows myo to control the web's interface)

How We built it

flask and mongodb was used for backend.

css3 & html5 was used for front end.

Challenges We ran into

Several bugs were encountered on the way.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

The system required a lot of coding, which got tedious at times. This is why we are happy that we got a working model which consisted of most features we wanted to add.

What I learned

Having more people on a hackathon team helps get work done faster :)

What's next for Interwebs

Our next steps would be to add machine learning to the web as a method of coming up with a solution, which would be based off of information and responses from users.

In the future, we envision that this system will gradually replace current methods of online discussion. We feel that people will respond positively to the constructive thinking philosophy of Edward De Bono, which will make people want to use our system architecture more than other argumentative based discussion systems that exist today.