📽️ Manifesto

[ixahmedxi]

Manifesto

This document aims to highlight the purpose and values of Noodle as a product to get a better idea about what we are aiming to build and our plans for the future of this project.

What is Noodle?

Noodle is an idea that that came to be during our time in university, we realised that to manage our student lives and be on top of our studies, we needed to utilise many applications that most often than not, don't work together very well.

My personal experience at university consisted of utilising Fantastical, Things 3, Craft, Quizlel, Moodle, ChatGPT and Grade Guide, which are all great platforms and apps that allowed me to study well and eventually get my degree.

However, there was always this feeling that we can do better, often these apps don't sync together and so you would have to do a lot of manual labour inputting data into multiple applications, having them open together and switching between them constantly just to do what you need to do.

This is how the idea of Noodle came to be, what if we made a platform that contained everything a student needs to manage their studies, note-taking, task management, grade calculations, calendar & timetable, flashcards...etc

Just like how Github isn't just a code repository hub, you have issues, projects, wiki, discussions, actions...etc, Noodle strives to be the Github of students. A one stop shop where you can find all of your student data together in one place.

Brainstorming

With that idea in mind, we started invisioning what this platform would be named and how it would look like, as well as what sort of features we can expect when we have that much power in having everything in one place.

First things first, let's get the naming out of the way. Noodle is a name inspired by Moodle which our university actively used during our years there and so we just thought, replace the M with N. Genius!

Now the vision, while brainstorming what Noodle will be like, we realised that you can ultimately do so much just by having all sorts of these data in one place.

How about suggesting flashcards and tasks from the notes you take with AI? that would not only free up a lot of the mental effort to get these created, but it might also suggest things that you haven't thought about at all.

What if the moment a lecture starts, we automatically create a new notebook for you, redirect your dashboard visits to that notebook while the lecture is ongoing (you will obviously be able to "unlock" that behaviour if you didn't want it) but that would mean we can motivate you to write your notes during that lecture. When the lecture is done, we give you in a suggestion box some tasks and flashcards that you can add to your collection.

The ultimate vision

As you can see, the possibilities of such platform would be revolutionary for all students! The automations and gathering of all study material in one place would free up a lot of the mental effort needed to stay on top of your studies.

We invision Noodle to become a crucial part in many students' lives, helping them throughout their university years to get the best grades possible and motivate them to achieve more.

But what about after the degree?

One of the challenges with Noodle as a business is that the student sector is very hard to become profitable in, this is due to multiple factors such as the financial status most students are often in as well as that the platform will drop and gain a big number of students with them finishing their degrees every year, and so to be doing well we have to gain more students than the ones we lose every year.

And so with these hurdles we thought about ways we can give the platform for less while, as a business we can generate other methods of revenue that would let us continue doing it the way we invision it.

With that, we are thinking about creating a "Noodle job board" which would become a website that only contains internships & graduate positions so that we help our leaving students in their next chapter in life.

Not only that, but we know how hard it can be in terms of finances for many students, that's why we are also proposing a Noodle studies marketplace where students can choose to sell some of their accumulated study material such as their notes and flashcards to make a bit of money on the side. This also motivates them to create better notes because it could mean more revenue for them.

Noodle's role in the open source community

Noodle is not your typical closed source product that only the team decides where it's going and how to. Our first decision before we even brainstormed the idea of Noodle properly was that we would make it open source. There are many reasons for this, firstly Noodle is created on the side in our free time which makes it quite challenging to dedicate a lot of time towards it, hence being open source it means that we can get contributions to the project and help us build it.

Not only that, but we recognise the value of open source, from personal experiences. I would have not been where I am today without my contributions to open source projects, it actually was the reason I even got a job after completing my degree.

So with this, we hope that companies will look at people contributing to our project and give them a chance.

We also hope that in the future with our hurdles along the way, we can create some packages and publish them for all to use in their codebases as well.

We also recognise the importance of open source in the fundamental success of Noodle, and with that we have made it a rule that any revenue we make from Noodle, a certain percentage will go back to the open source community through sponsorships.

We have also positioned Noodle to be a project that utilises many very modern technologies in it's creation, this can be a great positive to both us and these technologies in that they would have a large project utilising them, where they can test out their new features. We strive to make Noodle an example of a production application built upon modern technologies.

The road ahead

With our vision of Noodle and what we want it to become, we hope to make students study better, more effectively and efficiently. We also hope to influence society in a positive way through our contributions to open source and our users' lives through the post-study products that we aim to create as well, besides the platform side of things.

In a very simple sentence, we want students to study better, make money out of it, and help them on their journey towards life after their studies.

We can't be more excited to work on this project and give it all. We have posted this as a Github issue in order to promote discussion on this project and see what people think. Thank you for reading our manifesto <3