Resolvelo| Better Together
Better Together
Guided Interaction Virtual Meeting Space
Summary
Our solution is a Guided Interaction Virtual Meeting Space. It is intended to help people identify and overcome their own biases on gender, race, disabilities, etc., while socializing and meeting new people. It is a virtual space where people can meet new people and have a conversation based on motivating questions that will be provided by the app. It allows people to enter a conversation with diverse people, under certain ground rules that promote openness, active listening, respectful interaction, self-awareness on unconscious biases, and a learning attitude.
How We Addressed This Challenge
What did you develop?
Our solution is a Guided Interaction Virtual Meeting Space. It is a solution intended to help people identify and overcome their own biases on gender, race, disabilities, etc., while socializing and meeting new people.
Why is it important?
People have a need to interact and socialize with other people. For many persons, the opportunity to have a conversation in their daily life with someone who doesn´t belong to their family nucleus or their immediate work team, is very scarce. As a result, we are having less and less conversations with diverse people, while we are learning about each other only through media and social media. This is the perfect environment to grow social problems such as racism, sexism, stereotyping, segregation, discrimination, political polarization, and bigotry.
What does it do?
It is a virtual space where people can meet new people and have a conversation based on motivating questions that will be provided by the app. The questions will help break the ice, guide people into talking about common likes and talk about themes they are curious about. It allows people to enter a conversation with diverse people, under certain ground rules that promote openness, active listening, respectful interaction, self-awareness on unconscious biases, and a learning attitude.
This solution can be used by specific groups of people (for example, can be used by an organization to promote socialization and diversity awareness among its employees) or by individuals (people who want to meet diverse people in their city, country or the world).
How does it work?
1. First, people create a profile where they input topics they like, topics they are curious about, and some basic categorical information.
2. The person about to enter the Guided Interaction Virtual Meeting Space receives a push notification of the basic ground rules for the interaction, which must be read and accepted every time a person is going to start an interaction session.
3. People will be paired randomly with another person, and they will enter a video call or chat room.
4. The app will provide questions to guide the interaction. The questions will be chosen from a question data bank according to the interests both people have previously mentioned, the dynamics that can be predicted by matching those two kinds of profiles, the stage the interaction is in (initial, developing, mature), and the goal for the interaction stage (break the ice, bond, expand each other's awareness).
5. Afterward, the app’s gamification functions will come in. The user´s profile will be updated with a socializing score and some other badges. The more you socialize with people, the more your score increases.
6. Rewards. Users will be able to share their socializing score through their social networks. At certain thresholds, users might get rewards that can be consumed locally in social activities (like a coupon for two coffees in a coffee shop); so users not only socialize in the virtual long-range world but can also go out and socialize with their community.
What do you hope to achieve?
We hope to contribute to reduce sexism, racism and other types of discrimination and bigotry by helping people socialize and check their own unconscious biases. Our solution intends to be easier to use, more fun and more effective than traditional bias tests. It is intended to facilitate an activity in which people can engage as often as desired, therefore having better results than diversity training single-time sessions. It is also designed to be accessible to people with different diverse functional conditions (auditive, visual, motor, etc.)
How We Developed This Project
What inspired your team to choose this challenge?
We chose the “Better Together” challenge because it offered the possibility to address situations that are part of our daily life and that concern us in many ways. We think that stereotyping, segregation, discrimination, political polarization, and bigotry are compromising human beings´ ability to build egalitarian, inclusive, and peaceful societies in many countries in the world, including ours.
What was your approach to developing this project?
First, we reviewed a long list of articles, videos and papers on racism, gender discrimination, stereotyping and bigotry. We learned that unconscious biases were responsible for many attitudes that make people experience inequality and segregation, from the workplace to public spaces. No place is exempt of these attitudes, which cannot either be attributed to a lack of formal education, as such attitudes are present in academic and scientific environments as well as in any others.
An unconscious bias is a way a person unknowingly draws upon assumptions about individuals and groups to make decisions about them (Allen & Garg, 2016). For example, Bocher et al. (2020) found six sexist recurrent patterns in everyday life in academia: (1) behaviors that aim at maintaining women in stereotypical feminine roles, (2) behaviors that aim at maintaining men in stereotypical masculine roles, (3) the questioning of the scientific skills of female researchers, (4) situations where women have the position of an outsider, especially in informal networking contexts, (5) the objectification of women, and (6) the expression of neosexist views.
“Open yourself for different possibilities”. “Check your biases”. Those were some of the advices we found in many websites and videos about inclusion. Easier said than done! We looked for tools intended to help people check their own biases. We found that many of these tools are either little interesting (especially for a person who is not particularly eager to take a long, boring test) or are not available to the public (as they belong to consultancy firms or other organizations that charge for their use). We also found that punctual sessions of diversity training seem to have little to no long-term effect on people´s quotidian behavior (Noon, 2018).
So, we concluded that our solution needed to:
1. Be easy and fun to use.
2. Allow people to address their unconscious biases on a long-term basis, rather than only participating in a single-time activity.
3. Help people satisfy their need for socialization while providing a framework to learn about their unconscious biases.
4. Allow people to reflect on all types of biases (gender, race, functional conditions, etc.).
5. Be accessible for users with diverse functional conditions or special needs.
What tools, coding languages, hardware, software did you use to develop your project?
We used different tools for different needs of our project, as explained below.
Conceptualization:
Our solution revolves around supplying the right questions at the right time for the matched profiles to guide the interaction and help it reach the interaction goal at a particular stage (break the ice, bond, expand awareness).
Approach:
To perform this task we need to create a database of interactions (paired profiles and activity), a database of questions, and a recommendation engine that will provide the questions to the interactions in the right moment according to the activity going on in the interaction. Due to the ample number of features on a profile and iterations values for the interactions (based on its features), for the classification and recommendation, we will be needing a custom neural network architecture model.
Development:
First, we have a classification algorithm that values the profiles according to their features (interest, likes, nationality, etc.), and with this, we create a profile database. Afterward, we have a classification algorithm that values the interaction. That value is based on the features of the profiles paired together for the interaction and the activity data input so far in the interaction.
According to the previous classification, the recommendation engine will recommend a question. Since the question will provoke an action the value of the interaction will change, and the classification algorithm will revalue it. This iterative process will continue until the interaction is over. To increase the output speed of the app we could create a database of all the iterations of the interactions. The recommendation engine will respond with output to each interaction in the interaction value until the interaction is finished.
Improvement:
To improve the question recommendation engine, we could use a permutation of importance evaluation on the features of each profile. That way we can enhance our classification model for the profile, and directly impact the effectiveness of the classification model of the interactions. Therefore, being able to supply every moment of the interaction with the most appropriate questions.
What problems and achievements did your team have?
Our project requires a lot of software development, which cannot be completely done in two days (the available time for Space Apps Challenge 2020), specially because none of us is a software developer and our coding skills are extremely limited. However, we are incredibly happy to have hacked the Better Together challenge by coming up with a research-based solution that can provide an educational experience for everyone, while providing socialization opportunities. We are excited to think that this idea could provide better results than regular diversity training, on contributing to reduce racism, sexism, and all types of segregation.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We reflected on the statement that “the idea of space exploration has been woven into the fabric of society over the last 50 years” (Dick, 2005), and on the existence of an “overview effect” experienced by astronauts (NASA Johnson Space Center, 2019). To conceive our project, we found a powerful inspiration in the fact that seeing the Earth from space allows people to change the way they see humanity, but the experience is expressed in as many ways as individuals experiencing it. This is how we came to the conclusion that our project needed to offer the opportunity to experience “an overview effect”, to people who might not only never go to space, but never even visit a foreign country (that is, most people in the world).
We used the NASA Unity Campaign (NASA, 2019) as a conceptual basis to design a tool that would allow other organizations and people all over the world to cultivate a sense of transcendence and connection with humanity. Just as NASA intends to encourage its organizations and people to rise above artificial constructs that divide them, and to enhance their sense of jointness and connectedness, we intend to do the same for people who work together at other organizations, people who live in the same neighborhood, city or country, and even people who live in different countries and would never meet otherwise.
The lessons learned by NASA and shared by Head of Diversity Stephen Shih (U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2020), are not only applicable to other organizations but to individual decision-making processes. We based our project on such lessons:
1. If “diversity can mitigate the blind spots” in an organization like NASA by providing full access to data, having multiple conversations with highly diverse people could help individuals gain access to such data and therefore close knowledge gaps in society.
2. NASA asks its leaders to “speak last” in order to create a “safe psychological space” for people to share their thoughts and gain diverse information. We applied this notion of “safe psychological space” to our project by incorporating ground rules for conversations that individuals need to agree before engaging in the activity, providing motivating questions for conversation and introducing randomness in the interactions (the user will interact with randomly selected people and will be randomly assigned to “speak first” sometimes and to “speak last” other times).
3. Our project is designed to encourage dissent by offering people the opportunity to interact in a diverse and safe space.
4. For NASA, building unity is about highlighting the common goals and missions over artificial constructs that divide people. Our project aims to build unity by highlighting the common goals as humans over societal constructs that originate bigotry, discrimination, and inequality.
5. Helping people to “keep things in perspective” and challenge their own cognitive biases is the ultimate goal of our project.
In addition to the data that we already used to make our project, we expect to use open data from NASA and its partner agencies for the Space Apps 2020 Challenge to identify relevant topics that could inform the motivating questions that will appear in the app.
Project Demo
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14mydye8uZ_Qu5KqSzXtQyrroI_FTAEvd/view?usp=sharing
Data & Resources
Allen, B. J., & Garg, K. (2016). Diversity matters in academic radiology: Acknowledging and addressing unconscious bias. Journal of the American College of Radiology, 13(12), 1426-1432. doi:10.1016/j.jacr.2016.08.016
Bocher, M., Ulvrova, M., Arnould, M., Coltice, N., Mallard, C., Gerault, M., & Adenis, A. (2020). Drawing everyday sexism in academia: Observations and analysis of a community-based initiative. Advances in Geosciences, 53, 15-31. doi:10.5194/adgeo-53-15-2020
Dick, S. J. (2005, April 4). Why We Explore: Societal Impact of the Space Age. NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/whyweexplore/Why_We_09.html
NASA (2019, September 6). NASA Unity Campaign. https://www.nasa.gov/offices/odeo/nasaunity
NASA Johnson Space Center (2019, August 30). The Overview Effect [audio podcast]. https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/the-overview-effect
Noon, M. (2018). Pointless diversity training: Unconscious bias, new racism and agency. Work, Employment and Society, 32(1), 198-209. doi:10.1177/0950017017719841
U.S. Chamber of Commerce (2020, January 28). 5 Business Lessons Learned from NASA's Head of Diversity. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G29UpXLK_mk