Inspired by the MACHathon
A mood board for the people in your (work) live
February 05, 2021
Nick Hills, Principal Developer at Valtech UK, got so motivated by the MACHathon 2021 and the amazing projects the participants delivered that he started to look into what is possible with MACH technology in his own time.
Keeping the MACHathon’s theme “Getting (Virtually) Unstuck” in mind, Nick came up with a brilliant idea to smooth the edges around an issue that should sound familiar to anyone that has been working from home: connectivity and closeness to colleagues.
The core of the idea is a real-time mood board to offer up insight into your team and how they are feeling. The finished tool should be as simple as possible for people to share something as simple as a digital 'Happy / Ok / Sad' with a click of a physical button.
Of course, what exactly happens once you click one of your mood-buttons can be edited: 'Please call me for a chat' or 'It's a head down kinda day' are just examples. As the system behind the mood board is all event-driven, it would be simple to connect any API to program additional outcomes.
How does it work?
The source of the interaction can be from anywhere online, but Nick chose a simple-to-use to TRÅDFRI remote control from IKEA.
His current button layout: top button = happy, middle = ok, bottom = sad, left button = change user, right button = change user.
As an end user you can see a real-time board view of your team and their mood and availability. You can also interact with Alexa to get a team summary and find out more on specific people via API calls back to Contentful. 
We can easily see us integrating this into our daily workflow to have at least some kind of substitute for having our colleagues physically near us to feel out the best time to approach for a conversation or a quick request.
For a more detailed explanation of what Nick has set up behind the scenes, a look at the prototype and even more insight into the idea you can visit his personal blog here:
blog.boro2g.co.uk
About Nick:
Principal Developer at Valtech and based out of Bristol UK. He describes himself as “Classic nerd, loves Mario, Pizza, DJ’ing and of course – technology!”
Read more about the previous days of the MACHathon 2021