Uni.Share

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Overview

Market Pain Points & Inspiration (Solution)

Some common problems that college students face:

Hard to find useful information helps choosing a course, preparing a course or getting better performance of a course.

→ Eg: Reddit forum, College bulletin website, RateMyProfessor, Student’s recommendation.

Pain Points: Lack of Information, Lack of Information Provider, Inconvenient, Time consuming.
Hard to trade used course materials.

→ Eg: University bookstore, Amazon, Ebay, Other students.

Pain Points: Still Expensive, Inconvenient, Time consuming, hard to find other students.
Hard to find useful information about a lot of things like off-campus residential, college events, and everything you can think about.

By observation: we can reduce all the problems to one single pain point: Information Gap!

Where the information gap comes from:
1. The lack of connection between students.
2. The lack of motivation for information providers to provide more valuable & useful information.
IF:
1. We find some ways that can help students get a chance to communicate or connect with other students.
2. Motivate students to share their knowledge, ideas, suggestions. --> Then all those problems would be solved easily.
For Example:
1. You find some students who have taken the same course (same professor) that you plan to take or are currently taking.
2. And they would like to give you some detailed information about the course and course materials. --> Then the first two problems will be solved easily. #### In this case: we come up with our solution --> Uni.Share App:
A decentralized C2C application self-driven by the university students community, where motivation comes from a true heart of love and a reward system consists of virtual currency "Uni.Corn" and virtual stock shares "Uni.Shares". Some ideas are inspired by a block-chain platform called Steemit. ## What it does #### Basic Introduction:
The application will be present in a "forum" way, like Reddit. Each post is called Uni.Post (Just a name).
The information will be separated by some big categories like: major, minor, textbook, housing, internship, research, clubs...
Each big category will have more small categories like: CS major --> CMPSC 464 (some specific class) ...
There are two roles in the community:
1. Info Providers:
  - Users that provide useful information like ideas, thoughts, suggestions that the user thinks could be helpful to the community.
2. Info Viewers:
  - Users who view the information.
Each user is both Info Provider & Info Viewer
There will also be a rating system for keeping track of users' credibility, which reflects users' behavior and could be used as a consideration feature while a transaction happens.

Core Feature: Reward System
What exactly do Info Providers and Viewers do in the community and how do we motivate Info Providers to post information?
To begin with, since this is a university community, we believe each user will have a true heart full of love to help other students.
But based on that, we decided to give some little award for students who have a true heart to help other students.
There will be two type of virtual currency:
1. Uni.Corn: The main liquidity in the community for making transactions, exchanging for real world reward, buying Uni.Shares.
  - 30 Uni.Corn = 1 Uni.Shares.
  - 1 Uni.Shares will get a dividend of 5 Uni.Corn per week.
  - 600 Uni.Corn = Gift Card, Discount, College/Club Events Tickets
  - All numbers are subject to further balancing.
2. Uni.Shares: For long-term holding in the community that allows users to get dividends each week, and have bigger weight while voting for a decision for the community.
How it works:
1. Each Uni.Post does not have value originally. (But Info viewers will give them value!) How?
2. Info Providers of the Uni.Post will get a Uni.Corn added to their account when each additional Info Viewer "likes" their post.
3. However, Info Viewers with more Uni.Shares would have a bigger weight of their "Like". Eg: If I have 20 Uni.Shares, then each "like" I give out would bring 20 Uni.Corn to the InfoProvider.
4. Users with more Uni.Shares could also have a bigger weight when there is a vote in the community.
5. Vote is used for Community-Self-Driven Development, Users could change some features of the app if a voting passes. ## How we built it
Came up with all the main features that should be inside our app and created a flowchart & mockup of the app.
Our UI/UX designer then built the an interactive prototype in Figma.
Achieved a rewarding system and Front-End using Flutter. Data is stored in Firebase for now but aiming to develop Blockchain to store Uni.Corn and Uni.Shares information.

Challenges we ran into
Excessive research on how to build a perfect currency system.
Ideally: The currency system is based on block-chain technology, due to the fact that we currently have limited knowledge on block-chain, we will use virtual currency instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Designed a somehow balanced currency system.
Built a complete interactive prototype in 12 hrs.
Finished coding all transaction, voting functions by Flutter.
Intensive Front-End developing in 12 hrs.

What we learned

Understanding how a decentralized social media works (research of steemit).
One of the teammates learned a little bit of Flutter from another teammate.
Communication and collaboration between team members.

What's next for Uni.Share

Conduct usability testing and create a second version of the prototype.
Finish building application according to our final prototype design.
Confirm exchange of virtual currency into actual products via sponsors.
Start trials in small groups and keep balancing exchange rates.
Building community and migrating to Blockchain based currency, achieve a fully decentralized community self-driven.