Our Voice

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Inspiration

In light of recent guest speakers on campus, our team noticed that the college community lacks a unifying platform for students to express their opinions, especially regarding changes to the school as a whole. There were organized demonstrations by political or cultural organizations, but the resources and support were scattered and difficult to find.

So we created OurVoice, a place where all student initiatives are stored in one-place. Activism starts small, but we hope that OurVoice can empower students to believe in the change one voice can make around campus.

What it does

In OurVoice, students can search and find all petitions or initiatives created by fellow sibs about concerns at their school. Once they’ve read the description and goals of the initiative, they can choose whether or not to sign it. When the number of signatures reaches 10% of the student population, it will be automatically sent to the admin for a response. There are five steps in this process, as highlighted by the progress bar on the top of each initiative: create petition, gather signatures, reach 10% student population, send initiative to admin, and garner response from admin. Through this automated process, administrators of the school will be able to receive popular concerns from students in a healthy and communicative way, and students will in turn know for sure that their admins have received and responded to their concerns. If a student searches for an initiative and finds no satisfactory result, they are prompted to create an initiative of their own after answering some simple questions that screen the students serious about campus-wide change. From there, students can track the progress of their petition as well as answer questions raised by the community in the Q&A section. Actions such as demonstrations or even general meetings will be posted in the action section, and each initiator can pin popular questions at the top.

Even if no change can be implemented immediately, petitions are one of many ways we can help build long-term change and create healthy discourse around the campus. By standing by each other and uniting our support before reaching out to administrators, we can demonstrate our commitment to these issues and let our voices be heard.

How we built it

When prototyping this application, we chose to use proto.io to create the front-end designs and screens that will be displayed to the user upon usage. However, some challenges we faced was the implementation of the back-end to this project.

Challenges we ran into

Because of limited time and energy, we were unable to develop much of the back-end for OurVoice. However, through proto.io, our prototype is fully interactive with most screens of the app complete.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

With two iterations of this project, our team learned how to design screens in a way that will seem intuitive to our users.

What we learned

By overhauling the initial design and settling on a blue/orange color scheme complete with photos, we learned the power of design in prototyping, as well many valuable skills in the process.