Amber Altruist

Inspiration

The concept of Amber Altruist began with the reveal of the HPCC's "Help Missing Kids!" challenge at the opening ceremony for UGAHacks 9. However, we quickly turned our vision in a different direction than the one proposed by the challenge. Instead of focusing on supporting law enforcement and other officials, we wanted to empower everyday people so that they too are able to become heroes for missing children. Our team came to a consensus that the Amber Alert system is not nearly as effective as it could be in allowing everyday citizens to assist in finding missing children. Amber Alerts offer far too little information, lacking critical details such as a picture or sufficient description of the child. License plate information is most useful to people who are driving, but they are the last group of people who should be looking at their phones. The lack of a convenient way of finding more information means that many people may simply ignore the alert. Furthermore, it intrusively stays on screen until it is dismissed and then cannot be easily accessed again if its information is needed. In order to address this issue, our team created Amber Altruist to build and improve upon the current Amber Alert system in hopes that it will help find and return missing kids.

What it does

The Amber Altruist project in its current state is a Python GUI that provides a picture of the missing child, the date they were last seen, and directions on what to do if you find the child.

How we built it

The Amber Altruist project uses the MissingKids RSS from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children with a Python script that parses the RSS feed and displays the information in a Python GUI built with Tkinter.

Challenges we ran into

A reoccurring challenge we ran into was our lack of knowledge and experience with the languages, libraries, and concepts we needed to create our project as envisioned, so we had to keep redoing our work just to create a minimum viable product. We initially attempted to use PHP with a website before realizing that we lacked the time to learn what we needed to use it for our project. We then decided to instead create an app using Python. However, nobody in the group had any experience in app development and struggled with importing the Python code to Android and iOS. Once more, we pivoted to a plan of using a webpage with Python code. We encountered two issues with this plan. The first issue was that PyScript did not recognize a third party RSS parser library we used. Unfortunately, fixing the issue would require writing our own parser or figuring out a way to import what we needed, both of which would have been too difficult to do. The second issue was that the alternative was using Flask or Django, which we had no experience with. This solution would also require that a Python program opens a webpage, which would have been counterproductive to our goal of making Amber Altruist easy to use. We eventually settled for creating a Python program as a proof of concept with plans to expand back to our original scope in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the way we handled the constant setbacks. Every time we realized that our current plan was not feasible, we pivoted to a new plan and began without hesitation. Our ability to quickly adapt meant that we did not lose as much time as we could have and we ended up finishing our minimum viable product without any hurry.

What we learned

Our team learned that proper planning and assessment of our abilities at the beginning of the project is crucial to smooth development. A proper project scope would have erased most of the problems that occurred. It is likely that the time saved from not having to constantly redo our work would have given us the time to create an application or webpage that would have been more in-line with our original vision.

What's next for Amber Altruist

While we may not have been able to create the project we had originally envisioned, we have not given up on our plans. In the future, we intend for Amber Altruist to take the forms of a website and mobile apps with far more features and an improved appearance. Amber Altruist may not be much now, but we hope it will eventually become a project that helps everyday heroes to save missing kids all around the nation.

Built With

• missingkids-rss
• python