Campus Watch

Entry page
Resources and Map with data points
Linked modle form to post an instance of a hate speech/act

Inspiration

After 9/11, there were reports of people ripping off Muslim womens' hijabs. After the 2016 Presidential Election, middle schoolers threatened their Latinx classmates with chants for deportation. Monuments of the Confederacy dot college campus in the South. More recently, Duke University has experienced a rash of vandalism linked to Nazism. While these are the instances of hate speech and aggression that enter the news cycle, for many minorities and women, catcalls, microaggressions, and worse are facts of daily life. This web app hopes to help broadcast and validate the experiences of these communities, allowing their voices and experiences to be heard, while encouraging folks who don't face some of these challenges, or who face different challenges, to see and understand the struggles of others.

What it does

Allows users to anonymously drop location pins with descriptions of what they encountered at specific locations. Can filter different types of incidents for the map display.

How I built it

The front-end was built with CSS, back-end with javascript, integrated with the GoogleMaps API, with databases stored to Google's FireBase.

Challenges I ran into

GoogleMaps API

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Integration of the GoogleMaps API, our javascript code, and Firebase. How nice it looks!

What I learned

So much...working with APIs, working under pressure, javascript, databases, etc.

What's next for Campus Watch

A mobile app, filters for spam and inappropriate images, messaging hotline for help, retroactively dropping locations. Maybe some data representation/filter-by-time functionality.

Built With

Submitted to

Pearl Hacks
- Winner BNY Mellon: Best User-Driven Hack

Created by

With the rest of the team, I developed the idea and brainstormed our ideal user story. I then took charge of the map component, researching map APIs and ultimately using Google Maps API to create a map of UNC campus with different colored sample pins to represent spots where hate crimes and microaggressions occurred.

Nan Pincus
I came up with the initial idea, then refined it with my teammates. For the most part, I worked on integrating the webpage's form input with Google Firebase, and then using the data points stored in Firebase to pin down a location on the map with a nice display widget.

Cynthia Dong
Julie Ragsdale
Shalier Xia

Updates

Julie Ragsdale started this project — Feb 17, 2019 10:59 AM EST

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