Channeling experience and identity, first-year Khoury students build anti-harassment app

Clockwise from top left: Ala’a Tamam, Paula Sefia, Raaby Omar, Amanda Rodriques, and Kerliyah Andrews.

If the first award was a surprise, then the second was a shock.

“I was giddy,” cybersecurity major Amanda Rodriques said. “It’s one thing to feel good about what you’re coding, and it’s another thing for somebody to acknowledge that.”

“I started crying because we didn’t expect it; we were surrounded by upperclassmen, the best in our classes, graduate students,” said Kerliyah Andrews, a business and computer science student. At Hack the Patriarchy, she and her teammates received the People’s Choice Award from their fellow hackathon participants, then the Activist Award, which the judges grant to the project that best addresses the one-day hackathon’s mission to build tech solutions for issues facing marginalized communities. “When we got the Activist Award, I was like, ‘Maybe we’re moving in the right direction with this.’”

“We looked around at other people’s projects, and I was astounded by what everyone else did. So seeing that we won two — I was absolutely shocked,” CS and design major Raaby Omar added.

The project receiving all these awards, called Big Sister, is a soon-to-be-released website and app where Northeastern students can anonymously report instances of harassment, catcalling, and sexual assault on campus. Big Sister uses that data to connect users with campus law enforcement and safety resources, and to create a historical map of sexual misconduct that college women can use to inform themselves and navigate the city more safely. Omar, Rodriques, and Andrews began developing the tool during the Northeastern Interdisciplinary Women’s Collaborative’s Hack the Patriarchy hackathon last November with two additional teammates: data science and international affairs combined major Ala’a Tamam, plus CS and cognitive psychology combined major Paula Sefia. The five, who just completed their first year at Northeastern, refer to themselves as PARKA, a play on their combined initials.

PARKA gravitated toward each other like magnets, bonding over the shared experience of being young Black women negotiating a school, degree program, and industry made up largely of white men. Within weeks of arriving at Northeastern, they were meeting weekly in the Snell Library basement, where they would camp out in green plastic chairs for hours at a time to study for Olin Shivers’ “Fundamentals of Computer Science” course, listen to music, and talk about their goals in computer science.

It was there they decided to compete in Hack the Patriarchy together, with Tamam the first to float the idea of an app to help women keep one another informed about sexual harassment in real time.

“Having info, facts, and stats makes me feel safe,” Tamam said. “If I know the type of area I’m walking through, I can avoid potentially dangerous situations.”

The others seized on the idea and added to it, suggesting an automated email blast to inform subscribers of a new report and a geographic heat map to display the reports.

“If you feel unsafe in a location, then you hop onto Big Sister, write down the location, say what happened and how it made you feel, then that location will be added to a map that everyone who subscribes to Big Sister can see,” Rodriques explained.

Their motivation was very personal.

“I’ve seen women wait a really long time to speak out about things that have happened to them, especially at parties. Even at events that I’ve been to — it happened to my close friend, and once they came out about it they got attacked like crazy,” Omar said. “There’s another story from my hometown, a girl who went to get a piercing and was harassed by the piercer … seeing all of this is really disheartening. I know that Big Sister can’t wipe sexual misconduct off the face of the earth, but even if it does make the smallest impact, I’m willing to work for that.”

Five First-Years Hack the Patriarchy

In building the Big Sister website for Hack the Patriarchy, the women each took ownership of a technical niche and stretched their skills in unique ways.

Omar put her design major to work on the website’s front end. She’d never designed such an elaborate website, much less under a one-day time limit, and she found her teammates’ support crucial in learning to re-design on the fly and write elaborate code under pressure.

Tamam’s data science know-how allowed her to pick up the slack wherever she was needed. She spent a lot of the hackathon working with Omar on the front-facing site, but hopped over to the back end to help Sefia, Andrews, and Rodriques finish everything in time.

“I like being a catch-all,” Tamam said. “It forces me to use programs that I’m not entirely familiar or comfortable with.”

Rodriques, a cybersecurity major and self-described “back-end girlie,” took charge of Big Sister’s geolocation features and the security practices they require.

“Cybersecurity changes every second; new things are happening more often than I change my socks, and I have an impressive sock drawer,” Rodriques said. “Whenever I’m building something, I want to make sure whoever’s using it feels confident.”

Andrews was responsible for all things database, including setting up email databases to make sure new alerts got sent and received. She also whipped out her business major to help design the project’s high-level workflow.

Sefia, who also enjoys back-end coding, collaborated closely with Andrews and took charge of the process of issuing email blasts from Big Sister within seconds of a new report being filed.

“Before the hackathon, I was super stressed about it, but it ended up being a real confidence booster,” Sefia said. “Realizing what I don’t know, and realizing that I have the strength to learn as much as I can with the tools I already have, was really helpful.”

The PARKA team builds their hackathon project at Northeastern’s Curry Student Center.

Even though they established a plan and a division of responsibilities in advance, the five were still working during the final minutes of the competition, even debugging the last of their code as the other competitors filed into the awards ceremony. But the hard work paid off when PARKA presented a completed, functioning Big Sister website.

“The awards showed that there was a need for this,” Andrews added. “We got the Activist Award — that means women think that this could be useful in their environment — and we got the People’s Choice Award, meaning that they would love to actually have this website be implemented into their lives.”

The first person the women told about Big Sister’s hackathon success was Olin Shivers, the Fundies professor Rodriques, Tamam, and Sefia shared. His response is now Rodriques’s iPad background: “You three are hacker goddesses. That’s fantastic, I’m very happy to hear it, and thank you so much for taking the time to send me the update. I want to hear the details on Monday.”

But no one could have been more enthused by the website’s early success than the PARKA women themselves.

“Getting the awards was one of the happiest moments of my semester,” Tamam said. “It was a feeling of ‘I do belong here, I can compete, I found my people.’ It was a really great moment.”

“The next week after the hackathon we were all together,” Andrews added, “and we were like, ‘We have to make this an app.’”

Coming Soon to a Campus Near You

PARKA began 2023 in a familiar spot: camped out on green plastic chairs in the Snell Library basement. This time, though, it was to create a business plan.

“The app is a business and the website is a business, and so we have to move like that, making this serious topic something serious rather than just a school project,” Andrews said.

The newly official Parka Enterprises, with Tamam as CEO, hopes to deploy the project — officially titled “The Big Sister App” — to the Northeastern community sometime this summer before looking at expanding to other colleges. But they have their work cut out for them in the coming months, with a long list of questions to tackle. How will they verify reports’ legitimacy without compromising anonymity? How can they collaborate with existing resources, like NUPD or SafeZone? How do they build a user login using a college’s ID system? How will they collect and display the data without entrenching existing racial biases? But the team is ready to face these challenges head-on with the help of the Khoury community.

“I think it is astonishing them, the way their new abilities in CS give them power to affect the world,” said Shivers, who continued to offer feedback and technical advice on Big Sister after the hackathon. “They are expanding into this understanding of themselves with a joy that is inspiring to watch.”

As PARKA works to build out Big Sister, Tamam said, they’re also working to overcome the pressure and scrutiny often heaped upon Black women in a predominantly white, male field. But the supportive environment that they’ve built together has continued to provide inspiration and foster growth.

“It’s empowering to work with Black women in an environment where you’re not a token or representative of your entire demographic group,” Tamam said.

This shared experience and understanding influences what design choices the PARKA women make, and what defaults they question.

“It can be something as simple as choosing not to have a picture of people on the Big Sister homepage because it will never fully represent all the different types of people there are, and this is a system for everyone,” Rodriques explained. “As minorities, that was something we didn’t have to explain to each other. We just understood the importance.”

But PARKA’s experiences navigating race and gender don’t just influence the app’s design; they influence its very existence.

“PARKA and the Big Sister website — they wouldn’t have been made if we didn’t take into account our own experiences and want to solve the issues that we saw in our own lives. It wouldn’t have been a thing if we weren’t Black, if we weren’t women,” Andrews said. She encouraged other students interested in using CS to further social justice ends to “think about your own life and what you want to fix. How can you use technology to fix what you see in your everyday life?”

As the friends prepare the award-winning social justice app for public use, Sefia offered another piece of advice, given to her by her mother: keep your tentacles out.

“Octopuses spread out their tentacles to reach and grab for their different foods,” she explained. “Reach out to different people, ask them what they’re working on. Look at your emails and see what the undergraduate research programs and hackathons have to offer. Put out your tentacles, and look for the opportunities that are all around you.”

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