KYR: Know Your Rights
An app leveraging on the power of crowdsourcing that lets women and other gender minorities know their rights when dealing with gender wage gaps, harassment, and other problems in the workplace.
Role:
Designer, Front End Developer
Tools:
Ionic JS, Flask, Rest API, AJAX
Timeline:
1 day
Achievements
SAP - Empower Women Through Technology Award, cmd-f all women’s* hackathon, UBC
The Problem
Current methods of filing a complaint for workplace issues are cumbersome in that they require navigating to and going through a long line of options that people have to choose from. Not just that:
it's also extremely difficult to get the reliable data from the legislation
the legislative laws vary from province to province making it difficult to exactly pin point what the user needs
some of the provincial websites crash when loaded thus making the data unreliable
Even in developed countries like Canada, discrimination at work places is still vivid.
And unfortunately, the process of filing a complaint is hard, inaccessible and all sorts of confusing.
The Solution
The application empowers employees who may have experienced some form of harassment or human rights violation in the workplace. The user fills out a form and summarizes their experience. The application then displays recommendations, the Canadian law being violated, next steps, and resources available. Additionally, the output displays a similar past user experience and the resolution (if any) experienced along with a similarity score comparing the two experiences.
We developed this app in the hackathon in about 24 hours. My teammates were excellent people from different majors and years from the University of British Columbia.
The Design
First, we scraped the web for relevant workplace discrimination in Canada, and used the results to build a (fictional) archive of past user experiences stored in a CSV file. We then distributed task:
Build a .py script that implements
word2vecandcosine_similarityto return the most similar past user experience given our CSV archive.Utilize Flask, REST API, and a Sheets API to link .py file to mobile app front-end
Build a user-friendly mobile app that inputs a workplace violation and user experience, and outputs result from the REST API using Ionic on React and is being hosted on a subdomain
All the technologies we struggled with…and used
Challenges we ran into
Scraping legal information from Canada government websites
Setting up the JS environment
Connecting Ionic on React to the REST Api using ajax calls and AXIOS
Bypassing the CORS protocol for HTTP
How do we take it forward from a one day hackathon?
Improve UI for better interaction and accessibility
Create a community of people who have faced discrimination, what they did about it, and the resolution
Crowdsourcing an archive of discriminatory workplace behavior and actual outcomes
Expanding topics from workplace to include:
immigration experiences
interactions with the police
parking violations
This platform creates a community for people who have been treated unjustly in the workplace, enabling them to access resources, reference specific legislation, and view similar cases and their outcomes to know what to expect.
We won a little something for this impactful idea.
Sponsored by SAP, we got the Empower Women Award at the Hackathon.
