AidAtlas

Inspiration

One of the teammate comes from a war impacted region. We are tired of feeling helpless on a daily basis. We wanted to act.

What it does

AidAtlas is a humanitarian donation platform that transforms how people engage with global crises. By combining real-time conflict tracking, AI-powered personalization, and gamification elements, we make humanitarian giving accessible, engaging, and impactful. The platform addresses donation decision fatigue by automatically matching users with verified organizations working in conflicts they care about.

The goal is to turn awareness into impact, all in one place.

How we built it

1. Development Platform: The entire application was built using Replit, a collaborative cloud-based IDE that enables rapid full-stack development with integrated hosting, version control, and AI-assisted coding. Replit allowed us to build, test, and deploy the complete platform infrastructure without local development environment setup.

2. Main Features

a. Automated Conflict Discovery

• Continuously identifies and tracks active humanitarian crises worldwide
• Web scraping connects to UN OCHA ReliefWeb API for authoritative humanitarian data

b. AI Powered Personalized Recommendation Algorithm

• Matches users with conflicts and organizations aligned with their interests
• Multi-dimensional preference scoring system combining explicit choices and behavioral learning
• Behavioral learning tracks user interactions to refine recommendations over time
• Custom scoring algorithm developed in Replit
• PostgreSQL database for preference storage
• React Native for mobile interface
• OpenAI GPT-4o-mini performs multi-step reasoning to match organizations

c. Live Impact Map Visualization

• 3D globe showing real-time donation flows worldwide
• WebGL-based 3D globe visualization,
• Geographic API endpoint provides donation flow data
• Seeded with 50 demo donations across 31 conflict regions

d. Gamification System

• Achievement tracking and badge rewards for engagement milestones
• Achievement engine monitors user actions against badge criteria
• Real-time progress tracking with visual indicators

e. Donation Processing Integration

• Secure payment processing through verified third-party
• Complete integration with Every.org payment system (Platform never touches payment data)

Challenges we ran into

- Ethical Design Considerations: We struggled with how to make humanitarian crises engaging without being exploitative or trivializing suffering. This required careful deliberation on tone, language, imagery, and game mechanics to ensure our gamification elements celebrated meaningful engagement rather than treating crises as entertainment.

- Diverging views: We had divergent visions - one wanted to do something more "fun" while the other prioritized humanitarian awareness. Rather than choosing one direction we came up with a gamifying humanitarian platform without trivializing the crises themselves.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Building a complete full-stack platform in under 48 Hours
• Creating an engaging yet respectful user experience

What we learned

- Web scraping requires defensive programming: Working with external APIs and web scraping taught us to expect failures. Every API call needed try-catch blocks, every data source needed validation, and every feature needed graceful degradation paths. Assuming everything will work leads to brittle systems.

- User experience trumps feature count: We initially wanted to build dozens of features, but learned that a few polished, intuitive features create more impact than many half-finished ones.

What's next for AidAtlas

- Impact stories feed: A TikTok-style vertical video feed featuring 30-second stories from beneficiaries, aid workers, and on-the-ground footage from conflict zones.

• Deploying it for people to use and hopefully help our generation feel less hopeless :)

Built With

• gpt-4o-mini
• llm
• node.js
• openai
• postgresql
• python
• react-globe.gl
• replit
• three.js