Design Employee Guide and Ongoing Engagement Plan for Remote Staff
The Goal: We are hiring more staff and consultants to help us build various internal and client software projects. We all work remotely from each other, and we want our team to have the most positive and productive learning and work experience possible! We require a process, supporting documents like an employee handbook, and high-level implementation plan that we can do remotely, to help onboard our staff and keep them motivated while working remotely from each other. The new team member should learn about our company’s vision mission and values, understand our remote working standards and habits, as well as how to use and get help with the various tools and processes we follow for time-tracking, project management, reporting, etc. Potential Considerations (as well as any others you think of) What impression should new hires walk away with at the end of the first day? What do new staff need to know about our culture and work environment? What kind of tools are available for administrative and day-to-day tasks. How do they get started, how do they get help if needed? Is the process for new part-time contractors different than for full time employees? What role will the new hire's direct managers and co-workers play in the process? How will we gather feedback on the onboarding program and employee handbook and measure its success? How do we setup employees remotely to overcome the challenges associated with remote work. Introduce employees to a range of communication and productivity tools. Should we provide perqs (rewards etc) during this process, and if so what? Your Contribution We would like you to design a process, supporting documents, and high-level implementation plan that we will follow to integrate a new employee working remotely online with the company and its culture, and give them the tools and information needed to become a productive member of the team and bolster employee excitement and engagement even when working remotely. Your contribution will directly define how our company handles the first few days and months of a new employee's experience to ensure high job satisfaction, effective work habits, and long-term retention. We are excited about our projects and our work, and your creativity in helping us add new teammates is welcome and highly encouraged!
Create HR Job Description & On-boarding Materials for Junior Sales/Marketer Role
The Goal: We are planning on hiring a co-op or part-time student in a junior Sales/Marketing role in late 2020/early 2021. We need help creating HR Job Descriptions & On-boarding Materials for this role. Your Contribution We would like you help us by considering and producing material related to the position, including Human resource planning Recruitment and selection Orientation and training Career development Performance appraisal Financial compensation Employee benefits and services Occupational health and safety Please consider a) the role is entirely remote! and b) we will be hiring a student (therefore this may be a relatively short term position (4 to 8 months) followed by an offer of employment. Your contribution will directly define how we staff this role but also be useful to our other staffing needs. We are excited about our projects and our work, and your creativity in helping us add new teammates is welcome and highly encouraged!
Design On-boarding Process and Plan for New Remote Hires
The Goal: We are hiring more staff and consultants to help us build various internal and client software projects. We all work remotely from each other, and we want our team to have the most positive and productive learning and work experience possible! We require a process, supporting documents, and high-level implementation plan that we can do remotely, to effectively onboard new hires (including co-ops, recent graduates, and temporary contractors) to our company. The new team member should learn about our company’s vision mission and values, our remote working standards and habits, as well as the various tools and processes we follow for time-tracking, project management, reporting, etc. Potential Considerations (as well as any others you think of) Is the onboarding process a single event, or multiple? How long will the onboarding process last? What impression should new hires walk away with at the end of the first day? What do new staff need to know about our culture and work environment? Is the process for new part-time contractors different than for full time employees? What role will the new hire's direct managers and co-workers play in the process? What kind of goals do we want to set for new employees? How will we gather feedback on the onboarding program and measure its success? How do we setup employees remotely to overcome the challenges associated with remote work. Introduce employees to a range of communication and productivity tools. Should we provide perqs (rewards etc) during this process, and if so what? Your Contribution We would like you to design a process, supporting documents, and high-level implementation plan that we will follow to integrate a new employee working remotely online with the company and its culture, and give them the tools and information needed to become a productive member of the team and bolster employee excitement and engagement even when working remotely. Your contribution will directly define how our company handles the first few days and months of a new employee's experience to ensure high job satisfaction, effective work habits, and long-term retention. We are excited about our projects and our work, and your creativity in helping us add new teammates is welcome and highly encouraged!
Oct 2 to 4: Space Apps Ottawa Hackathon
NASA Space Apps Hackathon NASA International Space Apps Hackathon is an intense 48-hour global weekend hackathon for developers, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, astronomers and enthusiasts. Teams from 212 cities around the world will form and build products and prototypes against NASA-designed challenges that leverage spacecraft, celestial & science data. Space Apps Ottawa This is our fourth year helping organize and sponsor Space Apps Ottawa, our local version of the NASA Space Apps event. We have additional challenges designed by the Canadian Space Agency and other federal organizations. This year our hackathon will be online! Learn more about Space Apps Ottawa on our website: http://www.spaceappsottawa.com/
Recommend a "Trust and Collaboration Framework" for a Climate Change Application
The Goal: We are designing a climate change impact planning software that helps Canadian citizens take personal action to avoid, mitigate, and recover from climate change impacts. Examples of recommended actions include steps to recover from home flooding damage, or how to prepare the family for an evacuation during a forest fire. These actions need to be provided and managed by "trusted authorities" (which will include faith groups, NGOs, scientists, academics, as well as government officials). The definition of "trusted authority" is obviously political and contentious (our working definition is included below). Please research and recommend a "trust and collaboration framework" - a set of processes that we can use to identify and verify the "trusted authorities" and the recommended actions they provide. When its comes to producing climate change actions expect trusted authorities from different organizations will have to work together in a particular region; therefore we also need a framework for them to collaborate (for example request and receive feedback on recommended tasks, and gain some kind of approval before those are published to the citizens). The Climate Change Product We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change impact planning software product (related to "UN Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts") . The product will recommend a set of actions that ordinary citizens can take to avoid, mitigate, adapt, or rebuild from climate change disasters. We have created prototype mobile and desktop applications and performed a great deal of technical and business research and proof of concepts and work continues on the feature set. Trusted Authority Definition (Working Definition - your work will probably influence this) Trusted authorities are: individuals or organizations; and Have exceptional, targeted knowledge and expertise of global warming and climate change issues, impacts, resilience and policy measures; and Can be reasonably expected to provide unbiased, apolitical advice; and Accept the currently-available scientific understanding of global warming and climate change, as described in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. Examples may include local councillors and city staff, urban planners, environmental and sustainability champions, and government officials at the provincial and federal levels, provided they meet the requirements listed above. It is possible for a "trusted authority" to become "untrusted" over time, or vice versa. Your Contribution We think this is a unique project that will require you to really exercise your skills and creativity to come up with a framework. You will be required to perform primary and secondary research and policy analysis of existing collaboration and trust processes and frameworks. Then make a recommendation on what kind of model we should implement in our software. We can't wait to see what you come up with! The content you produce will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ content licence) which enables others to use it for any purpose, with attribution to you.
Extract guidance and actions from Climate Change documents using Machine Learning
The Goal We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change impact planning software product (related to "UN Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts") . The product will recommend a set of actions that ordinary citizens can take to avoid, mitigate, adapt, or rebuild from climate change disasters. Although there is a wealth of guidance information out there in PDFs or on websites, rather than go through those one by one, we want machine learning NLP and NLU techniques (and others?) to be applied that can automatically extract that kind of guidance from a PDF document or body of text. Your Contribution A previous class successfully produced a working prototype, using Amazon Web Services and python libraries, that is able to extract actions from PDF files and textual content. We would like you continue their work and extend their code to further improve the accuracy of this model, overcome some of the identified issues and challenges, explore some of the identified future enhancements, and also inject your own creativity and ideas. This is still exploratory and so we anticipate a few iterations where you produce some outputs, we examine those, and see how to structure the results into our proposed action structure. At the start of the project we will provide a set of PDF content, link to the code repository, give you an overview of the previous work, and anything else you need.
Gamification Business Case for Climate Change Impact Software
The Goal We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change impact planning product (related to "UN Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts") . The product will be a desktop website and mobile app that will recommend a set of actions that ordinary citizens can take to avoid, mitigate, adapt, or rebuild from climate change disasters. In order to make it attractive and fun to use, we have been advised to add a gamification feature (points, badges, levels, social feedback, etc) to the proposed mobile and desktop applications. The feature design has not been worked out at all, but it might provide points for doing actions in your house to protect against climate disaster, helping out in your local area, being given badges for being prepared for a certain type of disaster, etc. Potential considerations for the gamifying feature man include, but are not limited to: An increase in completed citizen climate actions An increase in citizen usage of the in-app action tracking and reporting An increase in citizen contribution to community action projects An increase in the average time spent per user session Identifying which badges, and rewards should be competitive and which should be co-operative Identifying if any badges are national, provincial, or local/community Identifying which badge levels are available and how the process works Identifying which kind of social feedback is available and how the process works Before investing time and money in developing such a feature, we would like assistance researching and preparing a business case for the gamification feature, including research for likely implementation and ongoing administration costs, ROI, user experience improvements, and other analysis. As a stretch goal, you can look at gamification business cases to identify the costs of using commercially-available off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions vs customized development, and propose a high level implementation plan to roll out gamification feature in our application. Your Contribution We would like you research the various gamification concepts, trends, issues, and solutions that are used in web and mobile apps such as FitBit, Facebook, video games, etc...then make a well-reasoned, thorough, and well-referenced business case, for why a customized gamification system would benefit our future climate change product (or not!). The primary goal is producing a business case however in order to support that we would need to evaluate the implementation costs. Therefore we would also like to understand how others have gone about implementing gamification, the cost and availability of COTS vs custom solutions, and what kind of high level project plan is needed to roll out this feature (this assumes the business case would justify it). At the start of the project we will provide a walk-through of our prototype site and content. We will also provide a wealth of background material on the application, its overall business case, goals and objectives, and even detailed psychographic surveys and other recommendations behind the proposed gamification feature.
Design and build a new Android mobile app for a climate change application
The Goal: Create a prototype android mobile app for users of a climate change software product we are building. The Climate Change Product We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change impact planning software product (related to "UN Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts") . The product will recommend a set of actions that ordinary citizens can take to avoid, mitigate, adapt, or rebuild from climate change disasters. The initial focus is specifically on coastal erosion, flooding, and sea-level rise impacts. The Mobile App We need a mobile application that allows ordinary citizens to view actions they can take, track their progress, complete tasks, and upload proof (pictures and videos). They can also chat and request help from trusted authorities. The mobile app will be a prototype that helps us identify the actual mobile app requirements and design, and desired user experience. Some suggested content and features will be provided at the start of the project. The only real requirements are: 1) The app must work on popular phones using Android 9 Pie (or later) 2) We must be able to distribute the app via our website and/or email 3) Whatever solution you deliver and technical libraries you use must be compatible with the Apache 2.0 licence. Ultimately the content, layout, and technology are up to you - use your creativity! Your Contribution Use your skills and creativity to design and build the Android app. We can't wait to see what you come up with! The mobile app will be released under the open source Apache 2 licence which enables others (including yourselves) to use it for any purpose, with attribution. You will be able to showcase this app in your portfolio should you wish.
Gamification Study and Recommendations for Climate Change Impact Software
The Goal We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change impact planning website (related to "UN Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts") . The portal will recommend a set of actions that ordinary citizens can take to avoid, mitigate, adapt, or rebuild from climate change disasters. In order to make it attractive and fun to use, we would like to add gamification (points, badges, levels, social feedback, etc). We would like assistance coming up with research on gamification concepts and systems and then a proposed gamification system to suit our application (ex points for doing actions in your house to protect against climate disaster, badges for being prepared for a certain type of disaster). Your Contribution We would like you research the various gamification concepts, trends, issues, and solutions that are used in web apps such as FitBit, Facebook, video games, etc...then design a customized gamification system for our prototype website. At the start of the project we will provide a walk-through of our prototype site and content, provide background research on user types and customer personas, high-level gamification analysis, some suggested marketing materials including surveys etc. Potential considerations for gamifying concept can include, but are not limited to: An increase in completed citizen climate actions An increase in citizen usage of the in-app action tracking and reporting An increase in citizen contribution to community action projects An increase in the average time spent per user session Identifying which badges, and rewards should be competitive and which should be co-operative Identifying if any badges are national, provincial, or local/community Identifying which badge levels are available and how the process works Identifying which kind of social feedback is available and how the process works
Prototype search application to index climate-change and environmental websites using structured metadata, and display the results
The Goal: Build a prototype website/search engine to help us index climate change and environmental websites and company information for a new climate change impact software product we are designing. The Project Climate change is becoming a top concern of citizens and governments around the world. We are in the planning and design stage for a new climate change impact planning and adaptation software product. We are performing a lot of market research and are expending a great deal of manual effort to identify relevant websites and organizations. At the same time, many websites now use rich microformats and semantic metadata to describe their articles, events, and company information. This information is captured in the Web Data Commons project (http://webdatacommons.org/structureddata/) which uses Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org/). We think it is possible to extract from the Web Data Commons a list of relevant websites, articles, events, and organizations, and put it in a database or elasticsearch index where we can view, search, and export it. Your Contribution Create a simple prototype to demonstrate what is possible. Connect to the Web Data Commons data set (if the data is too large we can setup an AWS environment for you in our account). Then using example keywords we provide, look relevant metadata and extract those results to a web page that indexes them by type (ex. web page, article, organization, event). Store the results in a database and/or elasticsearch index. Create the ability to query the results and export as CSV, or with the original structured metadata. The web prototype will be database- or search-index driven but have very limited functionality. The prototype will consist of a search display page showing the results, with filters. There may be a script to extract the results and place it in the database and/or search index. Possibly there will be one or two additional pages to handle exports or reporting (to be determined by yourselves). The prototype should ideally be built using Java or C# technologies, as well as a PostgreSQL database, plus related technologies where required (HTML 5, CSS/SASS, etc). We can discuss data export formats during the project (probably csv as well as JSON of the original structured metadata). Your prototype work will play an important role in the development of this tool.