Hello, everyone. I'm Crystal Yang. I'm the CEO and founder at Automy. And today I want to take you guys through how JavaScript can be a powerful tool to solve social issues. So during this event, we've been exploring a lot of the technical capabilities of JavaScript. But I think it's also crucial to see how this language can impact one of the most important areas today. Which is social impact. why am I talking about this? there are tons of social issues that could be addressed with JavaScript. The challenge is actually making an impact when you only have a technical background. So today, I want to explore how we can build ventures that integrate not only a technical background, but also business principles to create tangible social good. So first, why technology? in my opinion, technology is a great tool for social impact. specifically, I believe it's for these four reasons. So first, technology is super scalable. you can build technology, software that can reach a really large audience very fast without any limitations of, geography. that other impact methods have. Also, technology is really accessible. So especially JavaScript, it's very versatile, very web based. So it makes it easier to build products that are accessible to anyone pretty much with an internet connection, which can really help in reaching unserved and different communities around the world. Also, JavaScript is really efficient. it can help automate processes, do real time data, and, allow us just to optimize resources and improve outcomes for users. And then lastly, innovation, obviously. Technovation is the hub, in my opinion, for innovation. It's like a breeding ground for experimentation, and it allows us to rethink solutions to long standing social problems. So we have a technical, advantage, but how do you take a technical idea and transform it into something that actually has social impact? So to do this, I recommend learning from our business friends and looking at how they take their products to market. So building a successful product is definitely more than just coding. It's a lot about understanding market needs and delivering something that people actually find valuable. So I'll share my own experience with Automy to highlight this. my startup, Automy, is actually Started as a small JavaScript project actually, and now it's transformed into one of the largest educational game platforms for blind and visually impaired students. And today we've impacted over 1000 blind students and partnered with seven schools for the blind around the world. So some advice I've had from building Automy, I think first is to develop a MVP or as the business people say, it's a minimum viable product. So this is a common term in business land. And what it means is that you shouldn't build for perfection in the start. for example, in my case, my first Automy MVP was pretty crappy, to be honest. It was definitely far from ideal. It was pretty much just a program that regurgitated basic math problems, and it used text to speech and automatic speech recognition. But, I didn't try to make that product the best I could. Instead, I took this early version to teachers that worked with blind students, And from them, I was able to gather feedback. And the insights that they gave me were really invaluable. And they allowed me to pivot and create products that actually met their needs. So they were able to give me feedback on educational tools and what I should do to increase the educational value of the product, as well as what I could do to make the product more accessible. So this helps me build a more usable and, needed product, which in turn made it easier to get users and create actual impact in the future. So what can you do to build impactful products? So first, from that story, you should build a MVP. So your MVP should just include the essential features that you need to address the core problem that you're solving. After you have an MVP, you should go out and test and gather feedback. So don't go wait for perfection. You should launch your MVP to a small audience and gather their thoughts. This is because many business startup founders, especially put in a lot of effort a lot of work to making one product and then they realize that users customers don't actually need this, right? So people waste a lot of time and resources into building features that people don't actually need or even want. Yeah. to do this, you build your MVP, and you have to iterate through this process. So you build a product, you get feedback, and then you implement those features, and then you go back and iterate over and over until you are ready with the final product. This is a great advantage of computer science and JavaScript, actually, since it's super, super easy to make changes compared to other mediums. So for example, if you're like building hardware, this would be terrible because you would have to build a new prototype and then ship it out and all this stuff that you would need to do. When in computer science, for example, when I was building Automy, a teacher would just tell me like, Hey, it would be great if you could make Automy compatible with screen readers or with keyboard interaction. And in at most a week, I would be able to implement their suggestions. yeah. There's definitely a great side to computer science and that helps a lot with this idea of product and iteration. So next, I would love to give some information on how to build a team. So building a team is really important because if you want to scale your startup or your technology, it requires more people to do outreach, to do promotion, to help you build your platform, all this sort of stuff. So currently, Autumny's team is actually made up of over 30 volunteers, which is super exciting. And they're all dedicated to the same cause. And building this team, was pretty hard for me. I didn't have any startup experience in the past, but it was really interesting and people asked me a lot how I do it. So for me, I did it through, two ways. So first I identified my audience. So I knew who I would need to help me build my product So I knew I needed developers designers and outreach people and social media teams and other people so I only looked for this group of Team members. So a lot of people just Take on all sorts of volunteers just willing to do anything Like i've seen like an hr manager at a 10 person like volunteer venture, but, yeah, definitely identify what you need so you don't waste any time into recruiting people. And then the second thing is how do I actually recruit people? So the best thing about having a nonprofit is that there are volunteers out there willing to do work. So on Google's development course, they actually have a thing where they recommend people who are just starting to learn about technology. To websites such as volunteer match and idealify that allow volunteers who are just learning how to code or have a little bit of experience but want to find more experience in the real world. they show opportunities of nonprofits that are working to improve their website or just looking for help in general. So in my case, I was able to use this platform, to find a lot of developers and to find a lot of designers who were then able to help my cause. So definitely having a 5013C helps a lot, especially in the non profit world where you can recruit volunteers who align with your values. So those are my two biggest pieces of advice on building a team. But at the end of the day, you need people to actually have your product to make an impact. So here's what worked for us in getting connections with users. So first. Obviously, you have to know who you're targeting. So know who will benefit from your project and know how to access them. So for us, it was blind students and their teachers and to access them. We contacted schools for the blind and developed with our users. And they were able to, actually find value in our games. Again, the second point, aligns with the MVP idea. You should be building for users, not based off of your assumptions. So you should always build with your customers in mind. In my case, I integrated teachers within the development of Automy, and it became much easier to attract users because we were solving real problems, not just hypothetical ones. And a lot of times people can use different, promotion tactics, social media, community events, word of mouth, whatever you've identified your audiences, figure out how best to reach them. So next I want to talk about why JavaScript. JavaScript is the ideal tool for social impact. First of all, it's a website. There's tons of accessibility with the website. It's used all across the internet. As long as you have internet, as long as you can access websites, you can use a JavaScript project. So this definitely breaks down barriers to access and allows for people all around the world with connection to internet to use your products. Next JavaScript is super interactive. It's very user friendly and it can be customized for people with all sorts of different abilities. And lastly, JavaScript is able to be integrated with all sorts of other technologies. So currently, for example, if you want natural language processing in your, in your code, you can integrate, chat GPT API into your JavaScript programs. if you want to integrate hardware, you could easily code some sort of hardware compatibility that can interact with the JavaScript backend and overall JavaScript just. makes it easy to combine different languages and tools with back end systems of websites. this would allow developers to just create innovative social solutions tailored towards social impact. to wrap up, JavaScript is more than just a technical skill. It's definitely a great tool to bridge the digital world and real world social challenges. And, by building scalable, and accessible and innovative solutions. Combining your tech projects with business principles can create products to have true social impact. So I hope you're inspired to keep using JavaScript in ways that are not only solving technical problems, but also contributing to meaningful change in the world. Thank you.