Writing an App to crowd-source free advice:

Problem statement:

Social engineering applications provide a wealth of information to the end-user but the questions and answers received on it are always limited to just that – social circle. Advice solicited for personal circumstances is never appropriate for forums which can remain in public view. It is also difficult to find the right forums or audience where the responses can be obtained in a short time. When we want more opinions in a discrete manner without the knowledge of those who surround us, the options become fewer and fewer. In addition, crowd-sourcing the opinions for a personal topic is not easily available via applications. This document tries to envision an application to meet this requirement.

Solution:

Let us say that most users can frame their questions in the form of one that can be answered with a yes or no. Then the problem of finding an answer is merely one of crowdsourcing it. Finding the audience is not at all hard if people are rewarded for their participation. For example, answering a certain number of questions buys the opportunity to ask a question. With a large sample set, the answers can be considered as grounded as possible. With this basic scenario, we now describe the tenets of an application that can serve this purpose.

Let us visualize a landscape of several clients that have a question-and-answer web page with the bidirectional option of responding to questions from others and asking questions for self.  As with all social engineering applications, this requires sharing with a lot of other clients to solicit a reply. These applications are fundamentally designed as a large-scale storage, a relational database for initial lookup and web interfaces to serve the query and response. Presto, for example, makes it easy to query via SQL against a backdrop of big data.

Let us instead consider a cloud-native web service and storage that facilitates this data processing. Then the problem of crowdsourcing simplifies to one of synchronization between many publishers and subscribers. We can take the example of Azure public cloud to discuss a solution for synchronization, but the approach is by no means limited to a cloud or a technology stack. Microsoft Intune is a cloud-based service that manages devices and their applications. These devices can include mobile phones, tablets and notebooks. It can help configure specific policies to control applications. It allows people in the organization to use their devices for school or work. The data stays protected, and the organizational data can be isolated away from the personal data on the same device. It is part of Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility and Security EMS suite. It integrates with the Azure Active Directory to control who has access and what they can access. It integrates with Azure Information Protection for data protection.  So, if we view an organization as the company that offers this crowdsourcing application with an active directory to manage its members, then we can leverage an out-of-box technology to achieve synchronization between thousands of clients. The quantitative analysis of the application instances, data and compute are data left out of scope of this article for sake of elaboration only on the principles of synchronization and push notifications

Since it is a cloud service, it can work directly with clients over the internet, or be comanaged with Configuration Manager and Intune. The rules and configuration settings can be set on personal, and organization owned devices to access data and networks. Authenticated applications can be deployed on devices. The company information can be protected by controlling the way users' access and share information. The devices and applications can be made compliant with the security requirements. The users must opt into the management with Intune using their devices. Users can opt in for partial or full control by organization administrators. These administrators can add and assign mobile apps to user groups and devices, configure apps to start or run with specific settings enabled and update existing apps already on the device, see reports on which apps are used and track their usage and do a selective wipe by removing only organization data from apps. App protection policies include using Azure AD identity to isolate organization data from personal data, helping secure access on personal devices, and enrolling devices