So there was this app idea
The more I develop it, the more it seems like bullshit to me — I’d like your opinion.
The idea for this web app comes from the growing lack of participation in Italian trade unions and from the fact that, when I realized I was a socialist, I had trouble finding the right union to join.
So I wanted to create a map of Italian trade unions, giving each numerical ratings on certain axes (internal/external political engagement, political and economic vision, services offered, etc.), then have the user take a quiz and finally suggest the most compatible unions — based both on the user’s value system and on their CCNL (the national collective working contracts system in Italy, where each sector has at least one).
So the web app’s flow is: user enters, takes the quiz, and gets the resulting unions.
The main issues are:
Who am I to judge? Initially, I’d need a set of already surveyed unions with their value systems and numerical ratings pre-assigned. Also, the balancing of how much each question shifts a given axis depending on the answer (I was thinking of using the Likert scale — maybe that simplifies things). I need to do this balancing as democratically as possible, and I don’t know how. Maybe introducing a vote system could work out but seems to me that my vision could still be an issue.
The logic of consumption. I think a problem of our times is that unions are perceived as just another service to turn to when you have an individual need — whether work-related or for help with taxes — rather than the worker associations they actually are. This app seems to respond more to a consumer logic than to actually empowering and educating workers.
What do you think? Legitimate doubts? Insurmountables? Useless app?
Of course the code would be entirely open source.
Sorry if the english was not ok, this was written in Italian and automatically translated