This project consists of making a prototype of an innovation management platform web application. The main focus of this platform is to create a community where the users can make posts related to problems that might affect the community, or come up with ideas for projects that can bring benefits to the community. After creating a post, community members can express their support or opposition through upvotes or downvotes. The most popular ideas rise to the top of the platform. It's worth noting that users have the option to make posts anonymously, fostering an environment of free expression and privacy.
The platform includes a team of reviewers, appointed by Nova University, who assess the community's posts. Their job will be to review the problems and ideias the users post on the platform, by writing a comment and assign a classification on a scale of 1 to 5 stars, with one being the lowest and five the highest. Their attention is particularly directed towards the top-voted ideas.
Ultimately, the most voted ideas that passed all levels are subject to funding from interested investors, and from Nova University, and finally made reality.
Our mission is to establish a platform that empowers users to freely express their imagination by creating ideas for the benefit of the community and addressing the challenges related to the University. The ultimate objective is to turn these user-generated ideas into reality, providing solutions to problems and fostering a continuous cycle of innovation
Our vision is to keep the flow of new and creative ideas going, making positive improvements in the university community over time, while also fostering a welcoming environment for everyone to share their ideas.
DigitalWay is a fictitious company established for the purpose of this project. Founded by four Nova IMS students, our objective is to develop customized and user-friendly software solutions for small businesses and companies. We strive to deliver high-quality and efficient outcomes that cater to the unique needs of our clients.
At DigitalWay, our primary objective is to empower our clients to fulfill their respective missions and goals by providing innovative technological solutions. Our commitment is to deliver high-quality services at fair and reasonable prices.
Universidade NOVA de Lisboa is a distinguished and renowned public research university in Lisbon, Portugal. It is a thriving center of education for both local and international students and scholars. The university boasts a strong network of partnerships with prestigious institutions across the globe, and it is dedicated to advancing knowledge and addressing global challenges through its research and academic endeavors.
Together with representatives from NOVA FCT (School of Science and Technology), UNL presented us with this challenge. This initiative signifies the university's commitment to fostering innovation and problem-solving while actively engaging with the broader academic and global community.
Challenges presented by academic institutions like UNL and NOVA FCT are often at the forefront of innovation. They serve as catalysts for creative thinking and problem-solving, pushing the boundaries of knowledge and encouraging novel solutions. These challenges provide a platform for researchers, students, and external collaborators to explore new ideas and test groundbreaking concepts.
-The administrator will be able to access a back office where they can manage the platform and have all the privileges all the users have.
-Master reviewers will be able to generate codes on the website to give out to people so they can create their account with privileges (which are change in account types, specifically, to be a master reviewer, experienced reviewer, reviewer, moderator), they can revoke these privileges, they can view and evaluate pending reports, make showcase pages in the platform about specific content (they can manually select the problems or ideas they want to showcase on the top of the page this means set up a page where the content they want is shown sorted by tags, date, or votes, or selecting a specific problem or idea to be on top of the page), they can add tags to any idea or problem and lastly they can review the submission of information for the ideas to pass to the next level and comment on a project in the reviewers' specific comment section.
-Experienced reviewers will be able to generate codes on the website to give out to people so they can create their account privileges (which are specifically to be a reviewer), they can add tags to any problem or idea and lastly, they can review and comment on a project in the reviewers' specific comment section.
-Reviewers will be able to review and comment on a project in the reviewers' specific comment section, they are able to submit ideas and problems like default users. No type of reviewer can review themselves.
-Moderators can self-report on content that does not follow the rules of the platform, and can evaluate pending reports made by everyone else, when a report is found to break the rules, it is deleted. If not, nothing happens to the content, and the pending report is closed.
-Lastly, they can delete any tag from the database that is inappropriate and does not follow the rules.
-Default users - the students - can submit ideas and problems, comment on the discussion thread in the problem or idea page.
-The comments made on the platform are all character-limited.
-The submission of an idea can be an answer to an already existing problem in the platform or it can be submitted freely without being an answer to a problem.
-The person that submitted the idea is called the "idea initiator" and owner of said idea.
-The platform will allow users to write tags (keywords) related to a problem or an idea.
-Users can vote and unvote meaning they can add their vote to the vote count of something and subtract one vote from the vote count of something) on problems and ideas.
-Users can use search features to search for problems, ideas, reports. These features include searching by tags, sorting by date, number of votes, and readiness level.
-When submitting ideas or problems, default users and reviewers (only the lowest level) can opt to be anonymous and hide their name, making only the username visible. Other types of users cannot hide their name.
-There will be an automated matching process of the ideas that need reviewing and the available reviewers. This process needs to give the idea to the reviewer with more tags in common, on the reviewer side, there will be a small list of potential projects to be reviewed, sorted by the highest number of tags in common.
-Investors interested in certain ideas can fill in and submit a contact form in the idea profile page to get in touch with the idea initiator then they contact the investor to move the idea forward.
-Every part and information of the project is public so that investors can freely evaluate the ideas they are interested in investing in.
-There should be a milestone system for ideas to easily show the readiness of an idea to be invested in. This system is visible to anyone, and it includes 4 levels, in level 4 the idea should be ready for an investor to move forward with it.
-Each level will require the submission of forms containing the necessary information and documents about the idea.
-The four levels will require the submission of text or/and images to pass to the next level, the idea initiator will have to fill in and submit pre-made forms specific to each level.
-The forms are sent to the reviewer which reads the submission and evaluates if it passes to the next level or not. If yes, then the idea initiator has access to the new forms to pass to the next level again, until level 4.
-Everything that any type of user writes or comments or inserts in the platform (content) can be reported by any type of user.
-Additionally a chat feature to interact with other users was implemented.
To run the application, ensure that the following programs are installed on your system:
Visual Studio Code
Xampp
Any web browser of your choice
Follow these steps to configure the app:
1.Open the XAMPP control panel and initiate the Apache and MySQL services.
2.Navigate to the 'htdocs' folder within your XAMPP installation directory (typically located at C:\xampp\htdocs).
3.Create a new folder named 'PSI' and upload the application code along with its associated files into this folder.
4.Open your web browser and go to: http://localhost/phpmyadmin/index.php to access phpMyAdmin.
5.Create a new database by clicking on "New", then choose "Import" to upload the .sql file containing the database schema. Alternatively, select the "SQL" tab and copy-paste the contents of the 'iNOVAtionHub.sql' file to create the database.
6.To execute the app, open a new browser window and access it locally through the following URL: “http://localhost/PSI/”.
By following these steps, the users should successfully be able to configure and run the app on their system.