Raise is a social network dedicated to equality of chances. On Raise, tutors and professionals exchange information on educational and career opportunities. Tutors can provide better information to high school students while professionals get the opportunity to civically engage.
We will include in Raise a chatbot functionality in order for tutors to very quickly search for profiles that could help them get relevant information. In order to have a performing chatbot however, we first need to have a sufficient number of subscribers to the platform in order to have a sizable database. That is why the chatbot functionality cannot be launched in the meantime as the website.
Smartphone applications are more and more developing alongside or even replacing traditional websites. We at first thought about prototyping an app rather than a website. However, the users we target are varied in their age and access to technology. Therefore, we think a website is irreplaceable even though we will also have to develop an app alongside.
In our prototype, high school students are not included. It is a social network, a platform dedicated to tutors, you use it to get information for their students. While high school students could get information out of the database that the platform will gather, we believe they would not naturally decide to interact with professionals or volunteers. Tutors are relevant intermediaries in this context. However, once the content shared on the platform will have reached a sufficient size, which we believe will happen in three years from now, students could themselves get an access to the platform and the chatbot to go and look themselves for the information they need.