WURK.APP

Invite participants
Move them to a breakout room so they can complete a task away from the main group

Inspiration

Many large organisations cannot use existing videoconferencing tools due to privacy and security concerns. That means they have trouble with external video communications; for example hiring people, discussing with suppliers or customers, and even working with people in their own organisation. In the Netherlands, most of the 50000+ independent coaches and trainers are currently without work because they lack the tools to hold online coaching sessions. Their customers will not allow zoom.us and the permissible tools lack the features coaches need.

What it does

A user friendly, privacy centric video conferencing app, hosted in the EU. That allows large groups of people to work together effectively. That works across organisations. With which facilitators can split meetings into smaller groups. And that allows collaborative work. Users do not require an account to join a meeting. The service is paid for by the meeting organiser.

How I built it

WURK is a layer on top of existing open source videoconferencing libraries (Jitsi). On monday we started work investigating the API and assembling our team (developer + designer + product). Then on the day of the hackathon we started working on our idea. On friday we made our first designs and a mini website in wordpress. We created a separate service next to Jitsi that handles coordination of moderators and attendees. We up an AWS server to host the video software. And created screens that use our own service and the jitsi API to control video meetings to provide the features we need.

Challenges I ran into

The onboarding UX flow is super difficult because of different devices and browsers. Multilingual screens for different EU languages is a lot of work

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Working MVP with a cool UI

What I learned

We talked to a mentor in the Video conferencing industry: "The video conference market is booming." A part of the market is interested in security and breakout rooms. It was easy for the mentors and testers to use our MVP.