Project Factor

Factor Logo

Inspiration

It's hard, nowadays, to get a single set of facts. It's easy to find enough people willing to say anything just to get an audience. Worse yet, tools like Google, Facebook and Twitter are increasingly separating the pools of information between us. What we need is a unified base of things that are true. Not partisan, not subjective, not alternative, but true.

What it does

Project Factor is a knowledge accumulation engine. It collects general information, current events and scientific news into a single source. Project Factor doesn't collect any information on you: your location, your presence on the web or your beliefs. If you and a friend both search the same thing, it'll give you the same thing. That's not always a given in many knowledge engines, which may give you information that most conforms to your own views. Project Factor rejects this idea, providing features like easy citing of sources to share objective information with others, rather than hide it.

How we built it

Project Factor is built on the most minimal web framework possible. It runs exclusively on vanilla JS, CSS and HTML, but still manages to be a modern, dynamically-generated single-page-app (SPA). This allows user with even low system requirements to access Project Factor without issue while still enjoying an intuitive and appealing interface.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to create a service which used as few back-end technologies as possible to encourage usage without centralization. ProjectFactor can be downloaded onto any server and hosted statically, while still functioning as a full web-app. This limited our tools considerably, but we were able to find our way through to a solution

Considering this was the first time any one of us had ever participated in a hackathon, we were originally really stumped for how to approach the problem. We were originally remiss for an idea that would both encompass our patchwork development experience into a complete project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of our User Interface and User Experience, which was designed without mandatory need for any centralized services, such as a CDN. This allows lower-end users to access the site with more ease, and restricts us from censorship from larger networks.

What we learned

We learned lots about how to implement lots of the features normally required of larger, more verbose frameworks with vanilla JS - as well as making effective and efficient API communication using JavaScript's promises, allowing for effectively asynchronous execution.

What's next for Project Factor

We hope to include more sites into our engine, allowing our knowledge base to become even more comprehensive. We also would want to vet our information on an article-by-article basis, allowing for us to use even more information and be more precise in our information collection.