Signal Commons

Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for Signal Commons

Inspiration

People make resource decisions with incomplete context: a queue looks “unfair” until its constraints are visible. Signal Commons started as a small experiment in making those trade-offs inspectable instead of hiding them behind a single score.

What it does

Signal Commons is a deterministic, browser-only resource-allocation simulator. It shows how capacity, urgency, fairness, and constraints interact, then lets a viewer test an intervention and compare the resulting allocation. The same inputs produce the same output, so the trade-offs can be discussed rather than guessed.

How we built it

The project uses plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with no external data, API, or account. The model, controls, and visual explanation live in the browser. We added a guided demo and captions so the project can be reviewed without setup.

Challenges and learning

The hardest part was making the constraints visible without turning the interface into a dashboard full of unexplained numbers. We learned to expose the model’s assumptions beside the result and to treat transparency as part of the product, not as documentation after the fact.

Built with

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, deterministic simulation, GitHub Pages.

Built With

• education
• javascript
• simulation
• social-impact
• web