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.

Marketing Campaign Plan to enlist Local Citizens/NGOs/Municipal Governments in Canada for a Climate Change Impact software prototype

The Goal We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change impact planning software product. We need to enlist local citizens/NGO's/municipal governments in a one or two Canadian regions to help evaluate the prototype features. We need a modern and creative marketing plan to communicate, sign up, and engage with them. The Product The forthcoming software product will use satellite Earth Observation imagery, big data, and artificial intelligence to identify past climate change impacts and predict future impacts. It will focus on ordinary citizens as well as trusted advisors (such as municipal governments) who need to understand and plan around climate change impacts without requiring them to know the underlying science or technology. The initial focus is likely on actions related to disasters such as flooding, coastal erosion, and sea-level rise impacts. The product development will be as open as possible and require a lot of collaboration with academic groups and scientific communities, as well as communities interested in and affected by climate change (especially flooding, coastal erosion and sea level rise). However, to simplify the results we would initially like to focus on a few small regions/towns rather than seeking a broad population of users spread across the country. Your Contribution By the time this project begins we will have initial product branding goals, strategy, and guidelines, and substantial market research, which will assist you in your project effort. Your work will be instrumental in making these high level guidelines concrete and achievable. This will be an exciting new product in a new market so creativity is very welcome and in fact highly encouraged!

Identify climate change documents on websites using Machine Learning and Big Data

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 have created a machine learning Climate Change Action Extractor that can be used to automatically extract that kind of guidance from a document. However, we have to manually find relevant PDF documents via Google Search and trial-and-error. And, we cannot quickly find content that is on a web page and not in a PDF document. We wish to determine if you can use Big Data and AI techniques to identify web content that either contains a link to a relevant PDF file or contains the actual text that we can process (for instance a web page that says "10 Steps to avoid climate change disasters"). Your Contribution We would like you to explore Big Data and ML techniques on the Common Crawl open data set (https://registry.opendata.aws/commoncrawl/) and identify which pages have either relevant "climate change action" content, or contain a link to a relevant PDF. This is 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 example PDF files, some suggested sentence structures/keyword examples, a link to a prototype website where you can upload and test the content against our climate change Action Extractor, and anything else you need.

Branding work for online Climate Change Impact portal

The Goal We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change impact planning web portal (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. We would like assistance coming up with the branding strategy, design & guidelines, and then (time allowing) produce key graphics and messages for our prototype portal. Your Contribution We would like you to produce: 1) Branding strategy 2) Branding design & guidelines 3) Key graphics and messages (ex logo, slogan) 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, some suggested marketing materials etc.

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 to see if machine learning NLP and NLU techniques (and others?) could be used to automatically extract that kind of guidance from a document. Your Contribution We would like you to explore ML techniques on a set of PDF and website content and produce some "climate change actions" via a model. This is 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, some suggested sentence structures/keyword examples, and a proposed action format (in JSON) for the model, and anything else you need.

Canadian Market Opportunity and Business Model Analysis for a Climate Change Impact Content Portal

The Goal: Investigate the Canadian market opportunity and business model for a potential new product offering: a content aggregator portal related to climate-change. The Market Gap We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change impact software product (related to "UN Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts") . The product will produce a set of climate change impact reports in a given geographical area. The primary end users will include municipal government officials and urban planners, insurance companies, non-government organizations, and other stakeholders who are concerned about climate change impacts in their region or industry. Our initial research indicates that there is a very large and rapidly growing volume of climate-change related reports, guidance, and data sets spread across Canadian government websites. However it can be difficult for end users (their intended audience) to find and use them. We believe that there may be a market gap for a centralized portal (or series of micro-portals) that aggregates and links to the existing climate change content and data published by federal, provincial, municipal, non-government organization, and academic sources. You can consider the portal might have these features: Link to existing published material and data sets from Canadian government websites (municipal, provincial, federal), NGOs, and academic groups Search engine to make it easy to find and view the information Sections or micro-portals for aggregating and displaying content by region or by industry/topic (example health impacts from climate change vs. coastal erosion/sea-level rise impact; or an Atlantic Canada regional portal) Freemium-model: Portal users could access some content for free, and subscribe (pay) for access to specialized content and/or features. Subscriber/membership management functionality with different levels of access Your Contribution We would like to know if there is a market opportunity for this potential product offering in Canada (only). If you do identify a market opportunity, we would then like you to investigate the business model for the portal.

Design Training Program to help Riipen students who are contributing to our Climate Change Impact Planning software product

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 produce a set of climate change impact reports in a given geographical area. The primary end users will include municipal government officials and urban planners, insurance companies, and other stakeholders who are concerned about climate change impacts in that region. As part of this effort, we are working extensively with students using the Riipen platform. The student contributions vary widely per project, and include technical (prototypes, designs) as well as business work (market research, user personas, digital marketing). You can get a sense of the scope of the work by viewing our list of Riipen Projects. Each project has its own unique goals. However one constant goal is that we always wish to support the experiential learning and ensure that our student project contributors have the best possible educational experience . Your Contribution We would like you to develop a training/onboarding course and supporting material that we can use to provide a consistent and optimum experiential learning experience to our student collaborators on Riipen. This could include: checklist for onboarding students to a project Cheat sheets/FAQs Product and project background material Survey questions we can ask students during and after a project to improve their learning experience and understanding of the project goals and requirements We are excited about our climate change product and we want our student contributors to have the most positive and productive learning experience with its development! So your creativity is very welcome and in fact highly encouraged!

Prototype Zoom Virtual Meeting Feature for a Climate Change Impact Software Product

The Goal: Build a prototype Zoom virtual meeting feature for a new climate change impact software product we are designing. The Product 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. The eventual software product will use satellite Earth Observations, big data, and machine learning to identify past climate change impacts and predict future impacts. It will focus on end users and stakeholders (such as municipal governments or insurance companies) who need to understand and plan around climate change impacts without requiring them to know the underlying science or technology. The initial product focus is specifically on coastal erosion and sea-level rise. The expected high level product focus/features are: 1) Big data sets from satellites, including Earth Observation images 2) Data fusion with other terrestrial data sets such as photos, drone images, coastline measurements, flooding observations, etc. 3) Machine learning algorithms to examine the data and automatically identify past impacts (such as flooding or coastline erosion over time) and predict future ones 4) A set of technical components that allow end users to collect, view, modify, collaborate, and share the data products. Examples are a collaboration website, search engine, data warehouse, report engine, mobile application, etc. 5) Ultimately the idea is to make it easy to allow end user stakeholders to identify a range of climate change impacts in their geographic areas of interest, predict future ones, and improve their planning, policies, etc. Your Contribution One of the intended features for our product is a virtual meeting capability, so that users can meet with scientific experts and other users to discuss the results of the climate impact reports. We have an initial wireframe and graphics of how the virtual meeting feature could work. We need these to be turned into a working prototype using embedded Zoom functionality, that will help potential clients and partners understand the feature and how it can be used in the product. The prototype will also help us flesh out detailed design and requirements, and improve the ultimate user experience. The prototype will consist of a handful of web pages (probably 3 or 4). The web pages will be database-driven but have very limited functionality. One of the pages will have to allow basic user management, another will allow "channels" to be created. Within a channel, a user can schedule and host a Zoom virtual meeting. The channel will also display links to videos of previously-held meetings. The prototype must be built using Java JSP, JQuery, JPA and EJB technologies, as well as a PostgreSQL database, plus related technologies where required (HTML 5, CSS/SASS, etc). The virtual meeting technology will use Zoom Pro REST services (we will provide the Pro account access). The prototype will be hosted (by us) on Amazon Web Services. Detailed requirements and graphics will be provided at the beginning of the project. Your prototype work will play an important role in the development of the virtual meeting feature.

Prototype Website for a Climate Change Impact Software Product

The Goal: Build a prototype website of a new climate change impact software product we are designing. The Product 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. The eventual software product will use satellite Earth Observations, big data, and machine learning to identify past climate change impacts and predict future impacts. It will focus on end users and stakeholders (such as municipal governments or insurance companies) who need to understand and plan around climate change impacts without requiring them to know the underlying science or technology. The initial product focus is specifically on coastal erosion and sea-level rise. The expected high level product focus/features are: 1) Big data sets from satellites, including Earth Observation images 2) Data fusion with other terrestrial data sets such as photos, drone images, coastline measurements, flooding observations, etc. 3) Machine learning algorithms to examine the data and automatically identify past impacts (such as flooding or coastline erosion over time) and predict future ones 4) A set of technical components that allow end users to collect, view, modify, collaborate, and share the data products. Examples are a collaboration website, search engine, data warehouse, report engine, mobile application, etc. 5) Ultimately the idea is to make it easy to allow end user stakeholders to identify a range of climate change impacts in their geographic areas of interest, predict future ones, and improve their planning, policies, etc. Your Contribution We have some initial screenshots and graphics of how the product could work. We need these to be turned into a working prototype website that will help potential clients and partners understand the eventual product better. The prototype will also help us flesh out detailed design and requirements, and improve the ultimate user experience. The prototype will consist of a handful of web pages (probably 8-10). The web pages will be database-driven but have very limited functionality and mostly consist of html content that mocks up the eventual system functionality. The prototype must be built using Java Spring Boot framework and PostgreSQL database, plus related technologies (HTML 5, CSS/SASS, Javascript/JQuery framework of some kind, etc). It will be hosted (by us) on Amazon Web Services. Detailed requirements and graphics will be provided at the beginning of the project. Your prototype work will play an important role in the development of the product. It will also help shape our marketing, business development, and product roadmap efforts.

Design and build a new WordPress website to thank Riipen project contributors and showcase their work

The Goal: Create an open source WordPress self-hosted (not Wordpress.com) website to thank and showcase the contributions of Riipen students as they work on a new product we are building (a Climate Change Impact Planning tool). The Riipen Student Contributions We are building a climate change application that will use satellite Earth Observations, big data, and machine learning to identify past climate change impacts and predict future impacts. It will focus on end users and stakeholders (such as municipal governments or insurance companies) who need to understand and plan around climate change impacts without requiring them to know the underlying science or technology. The initial product focus is specifically on coastal erosion and sea-level rise. As part of this product development, we are using the Riipen platform extensively in order to work with many different colleges and universities around the world. Students are continually contributing to a wide range of projects including market opportunity studies, customer segment research, and technical development of WordPress websites and Android apps. We are grateful for their contributions, and would like to express our thanks and showcase their work online. The Thank-You Website We would like to create a dedicated thank-you microsite, using WordPress.org platform. This website will display the projects the students have worked on, showcase their project results, and thank them for their contributions. They can also use this website as a reference for future employers and as part of their professional portfolio. We are looking for a site that: 1) showcases the latest completed projects 2) lists all previously created projects 3) Provides a detail page on each project, listing the project description, school name logo and description, names of participants (if they opt in), and links to PDF versions of their completed work. Your solution will include a deployment script to deploy the website along with any plugins and content. Content and detailed requirements will be provided at the start of the project. Your Contribution Use your skills and creativity to design and build the thank-you website using self-hosted (not Wordpress.com) WordPress and free (open-source) plugins. Create a cool theme for the new site. Your work will be put to immediate use as we thank and recognize our student partners and their contributions to our climate change impact product!

Design and build a new WordPress self-hosted website for a Climate Change product

The Goal Create an open source WordPress self-hosted (not Wordpress.com) website to showcase a new product prototype we are building, a Climate Change Impact Planning tool. The Climate Change Impact Planning Product The software product will use satellite Earth Observations, big data, and machine learning to identify past climate change impacts and predict future impacts. It will focus on end users and stakeholders (such as municipal governments or insurance companies) who need to understand and plan around climate change impacts without requiring them to know the underlying science or technology. The initial product focus is specifically on coastal erosion and sea-level rise. The expected high level product focus/features are: 1) Big data sets from satellites, including Earth Observation images 2) Data fusion with other terrestrial data sets such as photos, drone images, coastline measurements, flooding observations, etc. 3) Machine learning algorithms to examine the data and automatically identify past impacts (such as flooding or coastline erosion over time) and predict future ones 4) A set of technical components that allow end users to collect, view, modify, collaborate, and share the data products. Examples are a collaboration website, search engine, data warehouse, report engine, mobile application, etc. 5) Ultimately the idea is to make it easy to allow end user stakeholders to identify a range of climate change impacts in their geographic areas of interest, predict future ones, and improve their planning, policies, etc. The Product Website The site will provide public product information to prospective customers and partners, facilitate blog and social media campaigns that promote the product, list the product features and benefits information, allow webinar and newsletter signups, and link to online prototypes and betas. The product site may also allow restricted membership access to the latest code & releases and other semi-private information. Your solution will include a deployment script to deploy the website along with any plugins and content. Content and detailed requirements will be provided at the start of the project. Your Contribution Use your skills and creativity to design and build the product website using self-hosted (not Wordpress.com) WordPress and free (open-source) plugins. Create a cool theme for the new site. Your work will be put to immediate use as we publicize our product development progress!

Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) recommendations for building a new Web Application

The Goal We wish to determine the Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment processes and tool(s) we should use to support the development & deployment of a new web application. We need your help to research and explore, and finally recommend how we should implement CI/CD. The Details Our application development will have the following characteristics: Distributed, stateless software architecture, combining multiple micro services that can scale up and out Expected underlying technology stack is Elixir, Typescript, React, HTML5, CSS, PostgreSQL, on Linux servers The infrastructure is cloud-based (AWS) and containerized (Docker) Development tools include Visual Studio Code The application source code will be open source hosted in a GitHub public repository. The build packages will be proprietary / possibly closed source hosted in a second, private GitHub repository Wherever possible we'd like to use open source CI/CD tools Daily release cycle Your considerations should include: What/how many deployment environments are needed what steps are needed to automatically build, package, test, and deploy code; what development branching and check-in strategy to use; how & when to automatically spin up/spin down temporary environments for dev & test; how to version, rollout, and backout updates; what kind of CI/CD reporting and metrics are needed to keep an eye on the process; a budget estimate for 12 months of your recommended CI/CD pipeline / tools (assumptions are fine but should be documented) In addition to your chosen recommendations, we are interested in understanding how you reached your final conclusion. Your Contribution Your recommendations will be put to use as we build our web application, and make an immediate difference to our development, testing, and deployment efforts.

Recommend features and content for a Climate Change Impact Planning software product

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 produce a set of climate change impact reports in a given geographical area. The primary end users will include municipal government officials and urban planners, insurance companies, and other stakeholders who are concerned about climate change impacts in that region. We would like your recommendations on additional tools, content, and features that would be useful to our end users while they are reviewing and sharing these reports. The Product The forthcoming software product will use satellite Earth Observation imagery, big data, and artificial intelligence to identify past climate change impacts and predict future impacts. It will focus on end users and stakeholders (such as municipal governments or insurance companies) who need to understand and plan around climate change impacts without requiring them to know the underlying science or technology. The initial focus is specifically on reporting coastal erosion and sea-level rise impacts. The product development will be as open as possible and require a lot of collaboration with academic groups and scientific communities, as well as communities interested in and affected by climate change (especially coastal erosion and sea level rise). Therefore, while we want to engage primary client segments such as municipal governments and urban planners, we expect there will also be many opportunities to build an online community and engage youth in this ongoing effort. Your Contribution While the primary product will be a climate change report indicating the historic and likely future impact of climate change in a chosen area, we expect that our users will want additional assistance while interpreting, collaborating on, and sharing the report. For instance, they may want to: video chat with experts on the report findings view adaptation tools that are tailored to the results of the report communicate with other municipalities that are similarly affected Package up some or all of the resulting report and publish it to a public location where it can be widely viewed and shared We expect you to research climate change adaptation and knowledge-sharing ideas, content, and tools. Then come up with detailed recommendations on features and content we should offer in the product to benefit our end users and increase the effectiveness and value of the product to them. This will be an exciting new product in a new market so creativity is very welcome and in fact highly encouraged!

Marketing Campaign Plan for a Climate Change Impact Software Product

The Goal We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change impact planning software product. We need a modern and creative marketing plan to communicate and engage with primary client stakeholders, scientists/academic groups, and young people who are interested in taking action on Climate Change (such as the Climate Strike student movements). The Product The forthcoming software product will use satellite Earth Observation imagery, big data, and artificial intelligence to identify past climate change impacts and predict future impacts. It will focus on end users and stakeholders (such as municipal governments or insurance companies) who need to understand and plan around climate change impacts without requiring them to know the underlying science or technology. The initial focus is specifically on reporting coastal erosion and sea-level rise impacts. The product development will be as open as possible and require a lot of collaboration with academic groups and scientific communities, as well as communities interested in and affected by climate change (especially coastal erosion and sea level rise). Therefore, while we want to engage primary client segments such as municipal governments and urban planners, we expect there will also be many opportunities to build an online community and engage youth in this ongoing effort. Your Contribution By the time this project begins we expect to have initial product branding goals, strategy, and guidelines, which will assist you in your project effort. Your work will be instrumental in making these high level guidelines concrete and achievable. We anticipate the marketing focus will be primarily online through social media, but this decision depends on your recommendations. This will be an exciting new product in a new market so creativity is very welcome and in fact highly encouraged!

Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) recommendations for building a new Web Application

The Goal We wish to determine the Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment processes and tool(s) we should use to support the development & deployment of a new web application. We need your help to research and explore, and finally recommend how we should implement CI/CD. The Details Our application development will have the following characteristics: Distributed, stateless software architecture, combining multiple micro services that can scale up and out Expected underlying technology stack is Elixir, Typescript, React, HTML5, CSS, PostgreSQL, on Linux servers The infrastructure is cloud-based (AWS) and containerized (Docker) Development tools include Visual Studio Code The application source code will be open source hosted in a GitHub public repository. The build packages will be proprietary / possibly closed source hosted in a second, private GitHub repository Wherever possible we'd like to use open source CI/CD tools Daily release cycle Your considerations should include: What/how many deployment environments are needed what steps are needed to automatically build, package, test, and deploy code; what development branching and check-in strategy to use; how & when to automatically spin up/spin down temporary environments for dev & test; how to version, rollout, and backout updates; what kind of CI/CD reporting and metrics are needed to keep an eye on the process; a budget estimate for 12 months of your recommended CI/CD pipeline / tools (assumptions are fine but should be documented) In addition to your chosen recommendations, we are interested in understanding how you reached your final conclusion. Your Contribution Your recommendations will be put to use as we build our web application, and make an immediate difference to our development, testing, and deployment efforts.

Establish Initial Branding Goals, Strategy, and Guidelines for a new Climate Change Impact Software Product

The Goal Research and define an initial branding goals, strategy, and guidelines for a new climate change impact software product. The Product The software product will use satellite Earth Observations, big data, and machine learning to identify past climate change impacts and predict future impacts. It will focus on end users and stakeholders (such as municipal governments or insurance companies) who need to understand and plan around climate change impacts without requiring them to know the underlying science or technology. The initial product focus is specifically on coastal erosion and sea-level rise. The expected high level product focus/features are: 1) Big data sets from satellites, including Earth Observation images 2) Data fusion with other terrestrial data sets such as photos, drone images, coastline measurements, flooding observations, etc. 3) Machine learning algorithms to examine the data and automatically identify past impacts (such as flooding or coastline erosion over time) and predict future ones 4) A set of technical components that allow end users to collect, view, modify, collaborate, and share the data products. Examples are a collaboration website, search engine, data warehouse, report engine, mobile application, etc. 5) Ultimately the idea is to make it easy to allow end user stakeholders to identify a range of climate change impacts in their geographic areas of interest, predict future ones, and improve their planning, policies, etc. Your Contribution We'd like to establish initial branding goals, strategy, and guidelines that will be used as a starting point to shape our brand for a new product offering related to climate change. Your work will help direct subsequent business development and detailed product design initiatives.

Design and build a new Android mobile app for participants of the annual Space Apps Ottawa hackathon

The Goal: Create a mobile-friendly Android mobile app for participants of the annual Space Apps Ottawa hackathon (which we help sponsor and organize). The Hackathon The hackathon is our Ottawa version of the NASA International Space Apps Hackathon, and will be held October 18-20 at Carleton University's Technology Innovation Management Program. The event is an intense 48-hour global weekend hackathon for developers, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, astronomers and enthusiasts. Along with 212 cities around the world, Ottawa teams form and build products and prototypes against NASA- and (in our case) Canadian Space Agency-designed challenges that leverage spacecraft, celestial & science data. You can learn more at the current version of our hackathon website . The Mobile App The mobile app will improve the participant experience during the event. Some suggested content and features will be provided at the start of the project. You can get an idea of the kind of content from our website . Some ideas for the app include an easy way to filter and view challenges, a way to receive updates and news from organizers, a list of helpful links and resources, and a way to vote for people's choice hackathon winner. It would be helpful to allow dynamic content updates from an online content management system (WordPress) pages. 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! Your work will be put to immediate use in this year's Space Apps hackathon in Ottawa, and possibly by some of our sister cities in the future! 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.

Design and build a new WordPress selh-hosted website for hosting and organizing the annual Space Apps Ottawa hackathon

The Goal Create an open source self-hosted (not Wordpress.com) WordPress website to help us host and manage the annual Space Apps Ottawa hackathon (which we help sponsor and organize). Our current website is static html, CSS, and JS, and is hard to update and maintain. The Hackathon The hackathon is our Ottawa version of the NASA International Space Apps Hackathon, and will be held October 18-20 at Carleton University's Technology Innovation Management Program. The event is an intense 48-hour global weekend hackathon for developers, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, astronomers and enthusiasts. Along with 212 cities around the world, Ottawa teams form and build products and prototypes against NASA- and (in our case) Canadian Space Agency-designed challenges that leverage spacecraft, celestial & science data. You can learn more at the current version of our hackathon website . The Website The site will provide public information to prospective attendees and sponsors, facilitate blog and social media campaigns that promote the event, list the hackathon challenges and important attendee information, provide bios for organizers sponsors judges & mentors, showcase previous and current hackathon winners, and display photos of the event. The site will also allow archiving of previous years' events. Your solution will include a deployment script to deploy the website along with any plugins and content. Content and detailed requirements will be provided at the start of the project. You can get an idea of the kind of content from our website . Your Contribution Use your skills and creativity to design and build the hackathon website using WordPress and free (open-source) plugins. Create a cool theme for the new site. Your work will be put to immediate use as Space Apps Ottawa's new public website!

Customer Personas and High Level Requirements for a new Climate Change Impact Software Product

The Goal: Research and analyze the user personas and their key requirements, for a new climate change impact software product we are designing. The Product The software product will use satellite Earth Observations, big data, and machine learning to identify past climate change impacts and predict future impacts. It will focus on end users and stakeholders (such as municipal governments or insurance companies) who need to understand and plan around climate change impacts without requiring them to know the underlying science or technology. The initial product focus is specifically on coastal erosion and sea-level rise. The expected high level product focus/features are: 1) Big data sets from satellites, including Earth Observation images 2) Data fusion with other terrestrial data sets such as photos, drone images, coastline measurements, flooding observations, etc. 3) Machine learning algorithms to examine the data and automatically identify past impacts (such as flooding or coastline erosion over time) and predict future ones 4) A set of technical components that allow end users to collect, view, modify, collaborate, and share the data products. Examples are a collaboration website, search engine, data warehouse, report engine, mobile application, etc. 5) Ultimately the idea is to make it easy to allow end user stakeholders to identify a range of climate change impacts in their geographic areas of interest, predict future ones, and improve their planning, policies, etc. Your Contribution We'd like to learn more about the prospective customer segments and their needs. You will help create customer personas and high level requirements that will be used directly for developing the resulting product. Your work will also help shape our marketing, business development, and product roadmap efforts.

Business Case for Identifying and Predicting Climate Change Impacts using satellite Earth Observation images, big data sets, and machine learning

The Goal: Help research and document a business opportunity for a new climate change impact software product. The Product The software product would use satellite Earth Observations, big data, and machine learning to identify past climate change impacts and predict future impacts. It would focus on end users and stakeholders (such as municipal governments or insurance companies) who need to understand the impacts without requiring them to know the underlying science or technology. The initial product focus is specifically on coastal erosion and sea-level rise. The expected high level focus/features are: 1) Big data sets from satellites, including Earth Observation images 2) Data fusion with other terrestrial data sets such as photos, drone images, coastline measurements, flooding observations, etc. 3) Machine learning algorithms to examine the data and automatically identify past impacts (such as flooding or coastline erosion over time) and predict future ones 4) A set of technical components that allow end users to collect, view, modify, collaborate, and share the data products. Examples are a collaboration website, search engine, data warehouse, report engine, mobile application, etc. 5) Ultimately the idea is to make it easy to allow end user stakeholders to identify a range of climate change impacts in their geographic areas of interest, predict future ones, and improve their planning, policies, etc. Your Contribution The analysis will be used as justification to commit further corporate resources and focus, and serve as backgrounder for investments and fundraising. We are looking for business case assistance with Market analysis Customer analysis (if time allows) Very high level revenue streams/risks analysis We are looking for a well researched, fair, and factual business case whatever the conclusions are.

Business Case for new Rapid Application Development software product for big data from space with machine learning

The goal for the project is to research and document the business opportunity for a new rapid application development product. This project would focus on big data from space paired with machine learning. The product analysis would be used as justification to commit further corporate resources and focus as well as as backgrounder for investments and fundraising. I am looking for a well researched, fair, and factual business case whatever the conclusions are. The high level product focus/features are expected to be 1) Big data sets from satellites, including Earth Observation images 2) Data fusion with other terrestrial data sets such as photos, drone images, etc 3) Machine learning algorithms to examine the data depending on the end user needs 4) A set of technical components that allow end users to view, modify, collaborate, and share the data products. Examples are a collaboration website, search engine, data warehouse, report engine, mobile application, etc. 5) Ultimately the idea is to make it quick (hours not months) to let end users define what they are trying to do, and have this framework produce it without requiring custom development.