Framing the Problem

What is the problem you are trying to solve? Who does it affect?

After research with other participants of this conference, we pointed out the problem: a lot of people come here to do some networking, but they don't know how to start a conversation.

We wanted to make it easier for visitors to meet people with common interests.

Idea Explanation

Our idea is to create some meetup spots during the conference, and these meetups would automatically appear in the calendars of people with the same interests. For example, you will receive a notification to chat about KendoUI near the second hall if it's in your and some other people's interests.

Implementation

We decided to use a React app because it's fast for creating an MVP, and to use Vercel to deploy the application. We're going to use a Postgres database with the following schema: https://imgur.com/a/3JcCmdg. So a conference participant has 2 types of interests: technical and non-technical. Meetups for technical interests are generated preferably after a lecture on the same topic, and for non-technical ones, randomly, when more people with these interests have free time.

Challenges

The main challenge was the discussion with very different people in the team to figure out how we can make the user experience better. Also, the processes in the just-born team weren't clear, but by the end of the development phase, we managed to fix it.

Accomplishments

Dear Princess Celestia, today we learned that teamwork is the most powerful and important part of every project. Because the best thing we did here was taking the best parts of the ideas from everyone in the team, and we got some synergy, which helped to improve the project, without personal ego.

Next Steps

We want to integrate this application with conferences more deeply: add interactive questions based on the currently displayed slide, pin comments and answers to the exact slide in the application to highlight the hot topics and hot questions, and set up meetups after the lecture based on these topics.