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A place to collect ideas for CfA health projects
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BOLD - Bridging Opportunity Love and Determination #24

Open DebL opened 10 years ago

DebL commented 10 years ago

One sentence description: We're looking to build BOLD - a mobile network to build social capital for young women aging out of criminal justice and foster care systems and/or teen motherhood

Link (more details/brain dump/alpha): email me for info at levinedeb@gmail.com

Project Needs (dev/design/resources): I'm a bit stuck on figuring out what platform to build on. We need a private social network so women can talk to each other (ala Facebook), video capabilities, photo gallery, mapping/GPS locators for crisis situations and support, APIs to connect with job ops/wearables (stress)/ food stamp signups, etc. We also need a backend data collection system on detailed usage. We've looked at Google and Salesforce so far, as well as building a custom site.

Status (in progress, pie-in-the-sky) Funded by large foundation. In progress - formative research with founding group of 12 women who've aged out of the system(s). Set to pilot in 4 cities in February 2015.

lippytak commented 10 years ago

Welcome, @DebL :)!

This sounds great. As for the platform, consider looking at Ning and Yammer. Yammer is basically 'Facebook for companies' but more generally you can think of it as a 'private social network.' I think this would be your best bet for existing products. Also I suggest you try really really hard to avoid building this yourself. It sounds like an extremely complex and feature rich product (more features than Facebook!) so anyone who says they can build this within your budget is probably lying to themselves.

Instead of thinking about all the features you'd like, consider thinking about the minimal features that would be valuable for the women. This way you can make sure women are using certain features before you spend lots of time developing them. Let me know if I can help think through an MVP or some of the product stuff. Good luck!

DebL commented 10 years ago

Thanks, @lippytak. (What's LippyTak anyway? Oh, maybe I don't want to know)

We've used Ning before and it's pretty hard to get uptake. I will take a look at Yammer - seems good, as long as they're really not collecting data (and selling) data on their users.

I get what you mean about a custom build; it will most likely be obsolete before we even launch. I will have more content/feature information after this weekend, and so hopefully can prioritize. I'm thinking a platform like Yammer where we can run APIs for the extra features that aren't built-in might work.

Thanks again! I'm sure I'll be calling on you to think this through.