This week we met with Professor Rosenfeld for the first time. We discussed our plans for the project thus far and got feedback from Professor Rosenfeld about how she thought we could improve and expand upon our ideas. The idea as a whole has been received positively and we are now trying to firm up exactly we want the app to do. Some new ideas that we have explored include creating a network of women who use the app in order to expand the potential bystander intervention in a possibly dangerous situation. We are very excited about promoting this app more as a bystander intervention app in addition to having a few friends who you can add to be further responsible for keeping tabs on your whereabouts.

Some challenges we certainly face are finding the balance between the safety and the privacy of the users of the app and not draining the phone battery due to extensive background GPS usage. Our next steps include firming up the flow of the app and its exact product design with regards to how to add friends and how extended the network of bystanders should be. In addition, we intend to solidify the name, as we have explored using the bonobos, as per Professor Rosenfeld’s research, as a symbol for our network. We also plan on entering challenges this semester and potentially hackathons to help kick start our programming efforts. We are hoping to accomplish a working prototype of the application by the end of the semester and continue it into beta testing for the following semester.