Hackathon Ideas

  • Google Analytics for life. Think browser extensions (like RescueTime) and mobile apps that observe your behaviour and capture events that can then be analyzed.

  • Google Maps for learning. Explore the map of knowledge and generate optimal learning paths. (I’ve been working on this)

  • A secure messaging/collaboration app for intimate groups like families.

  • Infra for serverless, but multi-device apps. The need to run a server to access your data on multiple devices is why many web-based FOSS apps are not adopted by individuals. Something like IPFS can be used for this.

  • Reusable Auth service (eg: Auth0)

  • I recently built this browser extension that recommends better alternatives to products/services. If someone wants to work on adding support for multiple lists, I will be happy to guide them for it.

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Can you elaborate on this a bit?

The Matrix ecosystem?

The learning map idea was presented by Danny Hillis in 2012 (which was inspired from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age). He got funding from Bill Gates but ran into political challenges when tried to roll it out as a govt solution in USA. Here are some other versions of the same idea. The last one of this is my FOSS project.

Matrix/Element is great for messaging with strangers or team members. But family members need to collaborate a lot more besides chat and audio/video calls. Think OTP-sharing, automatic location-sharing, calendar, shared repo of important docs etc. Some ex-Facebookers are building a similar product but without encryption. So a different UX approach is needed. But it can definitely use Matrix protocol and SDK for the core.

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Khan Academy (KA) does this quite well - its the closest we have to a comprehensive, adaptable learning system: https://www.khanacademy.org/commoncore

In general though education is a great place where FOSS can contribute, but it is more content intensive. KA does a fabulous job - can there be alternatives? Any ideas?

+1 for the Diamond Age reference. Easily one of the best science fiction novels. Since we already have KA working on adaptive education platforms - waiting for the “matter compiler” :stuck_out_tongue:

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The big problem with the likes of Khan Academy or Coursera or even Wikipedia / Wikibooks etc is that they do this only with their own content which is typically in a single format (video or MOOC or article). Which means a learner is never pointed to the best materials like Mathigon or 3Blue1Brown. No single entity is going to be “the best” content creator on a topic. A good learning map should leverage the best learning resources from the Internet - books, podcasts, animations, tweetstorms, newsletters, forums, interactive explorables, apps etc. Danny talked about exactly this in his talk. In my experience, this is precisely why learning resource discovery has remained complete ad-hoc, because every content creator eventually becomes a bad content curator.

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  • Airtable-clone but with a real database like PostgreSQL as a backend.

A ThunderBird UI like Hey or SuperHuman would be great.

Hyperlinking is the connecting glue of the internet that does the “pointing out” job pretty well. IMO, the problem is one of curation not connectivity. It is compounded by ad driven attention grabbing (Byjus).

This is also why non-commercial monolith platforms like KA and Wikipedia (or commercial ones like TED or Skillshare) have their value - they have built “trust” that helps you with the curation problem. You can’t solve the problem without trust and you cannot build trust without controlling the user experience → hence monolith.

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True, but aggregators like Google did manage to build trust while not hosting all the content by themselves. They’re doing that now with AMP, but that’s besides the point. There are tools like ClassCentral which are doing a good job for specific formats. We need something that’s truly learner-centric and yet, leverages hyperlinking to the best of the Web.

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Not a standalone desktop TOTP client but KeeWeb (a password manager with TOTP support) does a somewhat similar thing

I was thinking on a FOSS, E2E, synced password manager using advance cryptography (yes its a coincidence)

I use passwordstore.org, uses good ol GPG, has many clients, extensions (TOTP too), android app, passwords are synced via git repo (I use a gitlab private repo for it).

But it would be great if there’s an easy to use GUI client for the average user and a sync different than git, maybe cloud.

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I’ve made a list of ideas here : https://github.com/subins2000/subins2000/blob/master/ideas.md

If anyone’s interested in any of them, please do ping me! The topics are mostly P2P.

Canvasbird is an open-source organization🚀 where we work on real-time projects to enhance the end-user experience. Online teaching has become the new norm for most of the Institutes/Schools/Colleges amidst the pandemic. We are making an interactive Webboard and a learning management platform to provide flexibility in terms of teaching and learning experience.

Contributions are what make the open-source community an amazing place to learn, inspire, and create. Suggestions and PRs are highly appreciated. Please feel free to reach me out!

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Hi, could this be a prospective solution?

That seems to be Android-only (and proprietary). I was referring to primarily a desktop app, and later on maybe even universal.

Currently, it works on Android alone, but as per an article on XDA, they are bringing support for it in Chrome soon (Once enabled via flags, its interface would be accessible at chrome://nearby/)

There are a few open-source projects (like NitroShare, Dukto R6, Transfer on LAN, Flying Carpet) which can achieve your purpose but some of these projects are no longer maintained or have a required feature (like no option for drag & drop) missing

Kisanmitra - Rural Distress Helpline

The aim of the project would be to work on a multi channel Helpline which could also be generalised as a citizen grievance centre, where a few citizen volunteers or an organisation could try to gather grievances of citizens and followup with corresponding Govt officials for accountability and sustain democracy in true spirit.
More information about project here :
https://fossunited.org/project?project=Kisanmitra%20-%20Rural%20Distress%20Helpline

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