Won Desjardin’s Cooperathon Hexagramme Prompt prize (for health)

On November 9th I won one of the top prizes of  Desjardins’ cooperathon.

The Desjardins Group is the largest association of credit unions in North America. For the past few years they’ve launched “cooperathons” here in Montreal. The concept being to assemble teams and startups to tackle specific challenges in the fields of fintech, health, smart city and education.

People join teams, work together, strive to produce a validated plan and eventually present it to the judges within a few weeks.

My winning idea was to compare people’s lives by way of comparing diary entrees while maintaining their anonymity.  Just as we can use techniques to compare similarity of texts on wikipedia, we could perhaps do the same for people’s lives by proxy of diary entrees . These diary entrees would hopefully hold people’s thoughts, worries and dreams.

Imagine if you were 27 years old and you wonder to yourself.

-Should I travel the world?

-Should I double down on my career?

-Should someone like me get married?

Which choice will make you happy? I’ve interviewed a number of millennials and while they all want advice, they’re only willing to accept it from people who are already similar to them.

So going back to the diary entrees, if I had enough of them, you’d be able to see people’s similarity to you throughout time. (I could also use other similarity scores based on categorical data of course) Of those who were very similar to you  at some point, some chose to travel, some got married and some focused on their careers. You could then either read their entries that they wrote years later or do some kind of big data analysis to detect the overall sentiments. Presumably you’d have a better idea of the best decision to take for a person like yourself.

Like Quora, I expect most people will simply be spectators/consumers and only a small minority will participate and write their anonymous diaries.

But of those who write their diary entrees I aim to make it more fun by automatically creating mini “movies” out of them by suggesting sound effects, images and maybe even music based on the contents.

Once I have a few memories in a person’s life, I could then think about chaining them together in a sort of timeline which can also detect the dominant mood in the memories of a particular period and play the appropriate music.

If you said you used to party a lot on Saint-Denis street in the 80s when you were in your 20s, every time you’d visit that part of the timeline, music from the 80s would start playing and the background of the timeline would fade to bars on Saint-Denis street.

As far as health benefits go, this would reduce anxiety for people making life decisions. But it could also help those who’ve suffered a trauma. Seeing as it’s completely anonymous, people are free to talk about their traumas without fear. They could then see how others who’ve suffered like them have fought and moved past their traumas.

This could also serve to “immortalize” people’s lives and stories into a modern format that young people might be more willing to look at for advice.

Anyways, I felt there was enough potential here to make it worth pursuing and I’m glad the judges felt the same!

About the Cooperathon process itself

It was great! I particularly liked the free workshops as they were EXTREMELY helpful. I learned a lot and I’m very grateful to all the mentors involved in the process.

About my team

During a normal hackathon which usually lasts a weekend, the teammates you meet within a few hours usually stick with you throughout the entire thing.

One problem with something that’s 3 weeks long is that you can expect a lot of teammates to leave. And I mean it’s understandable to a certain extent because people have jobs,studies,families etc, but it still sucks for those continuing on by themselves. It’s even worse when those leaving don’t declare that they’re leaving but simply chose to “ghost” by no longer replying to texts.

In my case pretty much everyone left and I had to do most of the work all by myself. One of my friends stayed in technically, but only so that we could make the minimum number of individuals needed to participate.

There were lots of moments where I had my doubts of course, especially when I saw everyone else I was competing against with teams of 4 to 6 people. But I liked the idea enough and had nothing to lose so I thought I might as well roll the dice!