Citizen Science Description and Audience

Step 4 of this process was taking our three ideas and eliminating them down to one, solid idea and putting it into the form of a flow chart. The idea chosen ended up being the Dirty Code idea.

Project Information

Name

Dirty Code

Description

“Dirty Code” aims to be a citizen science platform which emphasizes the cleaning, and fixing of code snippets that are user inputted, or placed in via multiple pieces of software. It plans on implemented various types of coding, including but not limited to C#, JQuery, HTML, CSS, C++, Ruby, Python, etc. If relevant the code will include different pages such as a JQuery snippet containing the relevant CSS and HTML document. In order to efficiently fix a snippet of code, multiple users will be shown the same snippet and will be asked to either fix or clean up the code which will result either in the code working or loading faster.

Additionally, users will have access to a comment form which will allow them to describe their snippet of code, alongside the comment will be a preview of the code they suggested. For the user who owns the code snippet or created it, they can view the multiple changes and merge it into their code or leave it. Users will be allowed to vote for the most effective code snippet in a piece.

The audience for this project will include a varying degree of programmers from experts, teachers, students, and beginners who are simply learning to change the code and can learn from review others code.

Alongside the main features of this Citizen Science project will be multiple uses of Gamification. These include options such as Load Time Saved which will detail how much time you have eliminated from the web, or application loading times through the cleaning of code. All-Time Statistics which will include details of how many code snippets you’ve edited, cleaned, and fixed and Leaderboards which will compare on a daily, weekly, monthly, and all-time leaderboard how many snippets of code you’ve successfully modified.

In order to regulate the system automatically and manually there will be moderators as well as automatic checks which run a debug tool on each snippet of code after it is processed by a user which will check for errors, mistakes, or further breaks into the code which will return the code to the users queue if there are errors and detail to the user the error.