Agora Space

Inspiration

CITIES HAVE BECAME CROWDED PHYSICAL SPACES,

BUT DID THE CITY ENVIRONMENT CONTRIBUTED TO OUR ISOLATION?

Neighbourhoods provide important support, either if you're locked outside in the rain, or if you need them not to call the police when you throw your birthday party. We don't keep as much contact with our upstairs neighbours as we should. We are aiming to solve that with a solution to bring local communities together.

What it does

We bring chat, voice and video calls, and file sharing to your building so you can keep in touch with your neighbours. Only people physically living in the building will have access to your private messages. Tell the whole building about your ongoing kitchen renovations, or just the latest gossip.

But that's not the full deal:

It is estimated that only 13% of junk mail is recycled, leaving the rest to be burned, or thrown in landfill. This waste, and all the logistics of transporting, are a waste of energy and CO2 emissions.

Small business, like your corner pizza shop, or the concert organised by your local community group still rely on printed ads for their success. We cannot end printed mail direct marketing. So we provide a platform for business to advertise closer to their communities, to the people who will most likely use their services. By replacing small business direct marketing by digital marketing platforms, we are contributing for less paper waste, less logistical costs of distribution, and a cleaner environment.

How I built it

Interviewed people. Made a in person survey with 102 people asking if they spoke with their neighbour, besides "hello" in the past month. Almost half (46.2%) said no. On the other hand, in other one-on-one interview I hear people say:

"I Don’t know who is open to start a conversation”

In tech side, it uses an opens source chat platform called rocker.chat, together with a python server for chat room management. The user registers in the python platform, which sends address verification letters and SMS, while creating the building and neighbourhood chat rooms.

All this deployed with docker and Kubernetes on any PaaS service, like Azure. Website uses git pages with Jekyll (Ruby).

Challenges I ran into

• Deployment (I wanted to learn Kubernetes as a deployment platform)
• Team building
• Time
• Time

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

• A basic customer validation before jumping into building things, including 1-1 interviews, and a short survey conducted personally around the venue
• A basic landing page pitch

What I learned

• Learning to deploy a Containerised microservice architecture with Docker and Kubernetes
• That dirty old school works. Don't complicate things in an hackathon!

What's next for Agora Space

I want to test the MVP in my own building. I suffer from the same problems, and I want to solve them. I don't know anyone from my building.

Definition of Agora:

The agora (/ˈæɡərə/; Ancient Greek: Ἀγορά Agorá) was a central spot in ancient Greek city-states. The literal meaning of the word is "gathering place" or "assembly". The agora was the center of athletic, artistic, spiritual and political life of the city.[1] The Ancient Agora of Athens was the best-known example.

Built With

• javascript
• kuberneres
• python
• rocket-chat