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https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/coronathon-winners-rush-to-find-solutions-153385
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The problem your solution solves
Our stray animals also had their share from Pandemic, They can not find any left overs with the mass closures of restaurants, hotels and lock downs. This is their death sentence. At the same time, the fear of contamination, makes people abandon their house pets all around the world. There are many volunteers trying to help in these extreme days but the most important issue is to match the need with the help. In some feeding locations there is abundance whereas in other areas there is absolutely nothing, animals are starving. The animal lovers can not communicate effectively with each other in order to get organized for necessary help and Social media channels are not sufficient for systematic approach. There are one 100 million stray dogs and cats all around Europe and 8 million in Turkey. We thought that if we could solve the problem in Turkey, it could be implemented to other countries too.
The solution you bring to the table (including technical details, architecture, tools used)
We help volunteers come together under one platform where connect to each other and help animal care in a more efficient and effective way. We bring the right information instead of myths about animals and raise awareness, so that everyone can keep calm and stand for animals. The volunteers enter feeding points on the map first. Then, they can track the time schedule of feedings and the locations where there is huge lack of feeding . Platform connects pet owners, sponsors, municipalities and voluntary veterinarians together for support. The platform also brings awareness and offers a communication network and information exchange among volunteers and for people who want to adopt an animal.
we can organize stray animals feeding times and necessary care under self-isolation times by our map. By helping the volunteers to help animals, we will improve animal’s life quality and welfare during self isolation around the world.
We are building a platform that using Angular 8,TS, host AWS Cloud Services libraries Spring Boot Framework, Swagger REST Ionic(for mobile platform) Google Map UI Kits Bootstrap, Material Theme, PrimeNG Google Cloud: - Maps JavaScript API - Firebase Realtime Database and Authentication Tools: - Javascript, HTML
Bir Can/ One Life platform's backend infrastructure will be built with Spring Boot rest API framework. Organization’s UIs will be developed using Angular and Ionic frameworks for browser and mobile devices respectively. REST APIs will be designed for communication and connectivity. The whole backend platform will be run on Amazon's AWS for scalability and security. On the side of the end users, Google Cloud maps and Firebase Realtime Database services will be used.
Challenges we ran into
Due to Covid-19 it is hard to collect funding. Human health has the most priority during this crisis so animal care does not seem critical for the majority.
· Majority of animal lovers are elderly that's why it is hard for them to adapt to a new technology. Very user friendly, easy to use application is needed.
· There is a polarity between people: On one side there are animal lovers and on the other side people who believe that they are a threat to health and community. Even governments and municipalities are divided into two with their believes: some countries roundup animals with the thought of they are contagious spreading covid-19. At the same time, as human notion we are expecting a gigantic movement towards unity and increase in consciousness so we are here to address this challenge, bringing people together despite our differences.
· As the coronavirus pandemic spreads, lockdowns are extended and restrictions on global travel continue to tighten, transportation of animals through countries has been restricted. There are countries who really take care of their stray animals and they adopt animals from other countries where animals really suffer. But because of Covid-19 the exchange of animals between countries stopped. Even though this is not possible anymore, we would like to offer them a helping hand instead from the other side of the world.
· It is also hard to recruit the skills needed to build our vision.
· Incorporating live data on map
· Spreading our platform through social media as we don’t have an influencer
· Marketing for a social project concerning animals
Accomplishments that we're proud of
・Testing and validating with the potential users of our MVP ・Our website and social media products are ready and running ・We established many collaborations with NGOs and social organizations. ・Talked with some municipalities throughout Turkey ・We installed our hosting services to our platform.
The application has been planned to be scalable globally. We can apply this service in any city first and pivot it to other global issues, not specifically during corona, even after. We are lucky that we started from Turkey where we have millions of stray animals and it is increasing day by day as pet owners leave their pets on the streets. We haven’t launched our product yet, but even now we made a difference. We started a challenge on Facebook for asking people to share their photos while they are feeding animals, on April 4th stray animals day. And this campaign has grown so fast and the impact was beyond our imagination in Mustafakemalpasa area, where one volunteer was so eager to increase awareness and even municipality noticed the change going in a small town and started to make announcements which said “ please share some food in front of your doors and put water for them, we realized that sometimes just our willingness to make change changes everything, and our friends are happy in that town now, hope to increase this in other areas of Turkey and all around.. We have great interest from volunteers feeding stray animals already and this is a key success measure for us: we only need to attract them to our app so that we can organize everything together. We have already completed maps integration to an extent and we just need volunteers to enter feeding locations on our map. Our pitch received strong interest from local authorities and organizations in Turkey during our first and quite recent Hackathon organized by Coronathon Turkey and we won the prize of being among the best 12 projects of 1500 entries.
What we learned
We started with Turkey but then we realized that this is a common problem throughout the world. In China, many people are abandoning their pets, according to time. In England, a shelter for cats and dogs had to stop accepting rescue animals due to the coronavirus outbreak. For many, the restrictions are tantamount to a death sentence. Greek officials over the weekend said an online platform had been created for food donations and veterinary services for strays and pets whose owners are unable to care for them. In neighboring Turkey, authorities in Istanbul distribute around a ton of food for street cats and dogs every day, but having hard time how to distribute them without knowing where it is needed. In Serbia, where there is no state-organized effort to feed and shelter stray animals, people in several cities and towns have organized help locally. A similar effort is under way in North Macedonia where NGOs are calling on people to leave food on the street for the estimated 10,000 stray dogs in Skopje. In Bulgaria, veterinary clinics ran an information campaign after pets were increasingly found on the street because their owners thought they may transmit the virus. There was a similar campaign in Beirut, where Lebanese animal rights groups have reported an increase in abandoned pets. And this tragic story goes on like this, all around the world.
What's next for Bir Can/One Life
・Establish bigger pool of volunteers who will help us with the feeding location entries ・Pre launch with Advertisement ・Branding & marketing development, ・Initiate collaborations with community stakeholders and NGOs, to reach stray animals ・Influencer collaborations with popular societies, people, social organizations, NGOs, municipalities ・Informing volunteers about our platform how to enter data in our platform ・Go to market execution ・Funding will be necessary for further improvement of the application to carry it towards mobile app. ・Launching Mobile application ・Implement it to the other countries. ・Start new initiations and create new action plans for awareness using media and other sources. ・make it effective and secure. ・The application will be useful for all cities if there is a lockdown or not, adaptation will be necessary for every region according to culture, legalities and circumstances.
What we have done during the weekend
We had great conversations and learned a lot from our skill mentors which gave us great encouragement on this project. We thank them all and appreciate their support a lot; Adam Jagiello, Andrius Zil, Asu Sanem Kaya, Belen Suarez, Claudia Baracchini, Dr. Laure Lemrich, Ebru Turgul, Federico Bonelli, Frederick Suche, Gaia Guadagnoli, Inna, Marc Lanz, Razvan Todor.
We already established great collaborations from different countries in Europe who were interested in implementing our app in their country.. We decided to take the project to the next level and scale it up by locating feeding points starting from Romania and Gran Canarias. In Romania we learned from our mentor that the stray animals are also a huge problem. They will start our project as they start building feeding locations in their areas.
We also created a survey to see the pandemic impact on stray animals in other countries and posted it in an online survey channel.
https://forms.gle/rJd6w5HR6wMSLppWA
We also created a lean canvas on our project
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1k0TG5rK_ibycgqrH2NNCZ3U95ZIIuBkUE0wZHHKp_eg/edit?usp=sharing
Developed a prototype with the following components:
• Main website: https://bircan.life/. This website will be online • Added content to inform/educate the public on animal suffering due to COVID-19. • Registration form for volunteers • Developed google map location entry: • Implemented click and enter google map application for users to pin animal feeding location https://needspoint.com/mapdb/ • Implemented PS Form platform to help volunteers to coordinate their efforts around the feeding points. • Configured the data-sharing platform to be a stand-alone application to be used for Bircan’s purposes • Developed APIs and Integrate data-sharing platform to communicate with needspoints.com • Developed location-based user access management for volunteers and coordinators • Developed discussion channels for each location. Users who have access to feed points can chat/coordinate any efforts for their locations. • Configured mobile interface for the volunteers
We made a project budget during weekend;
Google API integration 2.000 $ class architecture 4.000 $ relational db architecture 4.000 $ plugin engine 3.000 $ API Plugins 6.000 $ ui/ux android 10.000 $ ui/ux ios 10.000 $ sso interface 5.000 $ Marketing 1.000 $ Social Media Influencers 1.000 $ Brochures 1.000 $ Salaries (Administration) 2.000 $ Total Budget 49.000 $
The necessities in order to continue the project
• Further integration with website and the data-sharing platform share data more effectively • Develop/Improve user interface for web and mobile users Once production is released: • Add existing locations to the system • Invite existing 10K+ volunteers to the platform as users • Training and education material content for volunteers • Social media campaign to get more volunteers
The solution’s impact to the crisis
Everyday thousands of animals are dying on the streets just because they can not find food during pandemic and they also become agitated from hunger. We can not really separate human and stray animal health from each other since they also belong to our ecosystem in our cities. We should be careful about how our actions effects our harmonious world drastically. Reflection of the love and peace created by our little furry friends, in our streets, is also a contribution to our mental health and psychology. Their health and our health goes hand to hand, and we can not really separate each other. Many animal lovers will be in a lot more relaxed state just knowing that the animals around are safe and taken care. It is the time to make our planet better for living for all of us.
The value of your solution(s) after the crisis
If we can adres this problem during a pandemic, our animal welfare will be improved afterwards too. Knowing that our little friends are happy on the streets would ease our consciousness. Hope to give our little friend the life they deserve.
The URL to the prototype [Github, Website,...]
The URL to the pitchvideo (Required)
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