iSchool Capstone

2021

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Croftery: Online community marketplace for cottage food

In Washington state, there is a significant number of in-home cottage bakers who want to sell food to consumers, and a significant number of consumers who would like to buy those products. However, current solutions for connecting the two do not comply with state law and make it difficult for cottage bakers to scale. Croftery is a dedicated place for sellers and buyers to make legal transactions with guaranteed food safety and form a tight-knit community. Sellers will gain more customers and revenue, and lovers of good food have a place to visit when they want to have homemade goods.
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CryAw

CryAw, an AFK cryptocurrency tutorial game, was created to provide comprehensive, structured cryptocurrency knowledge for those skeptical of investing in it or have an interest in understanding it better. Through proven gamification concepts and real-time data from active digital currency exchanges, we provide a novel and concise education method on the future standards of global currency. With CryAw you can enjoy yourself and compete with other users to create the highest value cryptocurrency investment portfolio. CryAw provides increased access to structured cryptocurrency knowledge - thereby cutting through the noise in the cryptocurrency space.
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CuriosityBased: 7 Forms of Respect™ Assessment Visualizer

CuriosityBased fosters curiosity within the workplace to help teams and companies build trust, collaboration, and communication. One of their tools is an assessment based on their 7 Forms of Respect™ framework. This framework helps individuals identify how individuals and teams demonstrate respect in the workplace. Their previous system for calculating and visualizing assessment answers was manual and extremely tedious. Our team was asked to automate this process and redesign the results delivery. The resulting product will save time for the CuriosityBased team and allow them to put more effort into services and consulting.
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Cycling Casper: Bike Lending Feasibility at the Natrona County Library

This project looked at bike lending programs at other libraries and organizations to determine if such a program could be implemented at the Natrona County Library located in Casper, WY. After researching other programs, models that could work for the Library were presented to the sponsor along with a projected budget, program guide, and list of partner organizations. If implemented, this project will help the Library fulfill its mission of advocating for literacy, education, and a thriving community.
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Data Driven Change for Connecting Rural America during COVID-19 Crisis

During the COVID-19 pandemic, more activities have moved online but not everyone has access to reliable internet or the skills to do activities like school and work from home especially in rural communities. By analyzing data that has been collected by Digital Navigators using a set of intake forms, this project attempts to assess the lack of access and skills to reliable internet and devices, and provide necessary resources to rural communities in Appalachia. The results focused on the availability of the internet, access to the internet, especially in low-income households, and interest in employment.
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Data Privacy Assessment for Washington State DOL

Unlike most major tech companies and public institutions, DOL does not have a standard privacy or data maturity assessment form for program-level use. DOL has studied models from cities like Seattle and commercial enterprises but found that none of the existing models fit their needs. The final deliverable of our project is the survey tool designed for review and adoption by Washington DOL. The survey tool will act as a preliminary check for current data governance practices at DOL, help DOL reinvent data privacy and stewardship standards, and serve as a foundation for WA DOL's future Privacy Impact Assessments.
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Data-Driven Waste Management Solution

Data-Driven Waste Management Solutions with trashcan pick-up frequencies are determined primarily by empirical observation. Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) sought a data-driven solution to better estimate waste levels and thus optimize waste bin placement and service scheduling. Our team detailed shortcomings of organization data collection and infrastructure, collaborated with stakeholders to create an appropriate data collection system, and created an optimization model to minimize costs associated with each collection route. Our efforts intend to reduce SPU’s expenses, support a cleaner city, and bolster SPU’s future information management practices to allow further opportunity. 
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Designing for Trust on Social Media

Social media has changed today’s information and communication world. Rampant mis/disinformation has eroded users’ trust in social media platforms. Through research, we look at how design considerations can influence what makes an information system “trustworthy.” For this project, we are sponsored by the Center for an Informed Public (CIP) and conducted an extensive literature review of 23 papers. We used our research insights to make a design toolkit to help designers building platforms build trust through the design process.
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Digital Accessibility & Open Library

Ensuring access to digital content for everyone is one of the core principles of Open Library & their parent organization, the Internet Archive. To ensure that this is true for all patrons, regardless of ability, this capstone project focused on testing Open Library’s code-base for digital accessibility. A test set of twenty pages was created for a WCAG 2.1 audit. Testing and remediation were done with the help of Open Library’s network of Open-Source contributors. Accessibility policies and documentation were drafted to ensure compliance continues in the future.
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Document Management System Selection for Microsoft Mixed Reality

The Microsoft Mixed Reality team currently lacks a centralized tool to manage policy documents. Our team focuses on recommending the best document management system to our sponsor that has functionalities including automated tagging, access control, version control, and notification. We have taken into consideration factors such as financial cost, usability, scalability, and user experience. Our project provides our sponsor with essential research findings on different DMS tools and valuable insights into improving their document management process, indirectly contributing to improving the efficiency of the overall policy document management workflow.