City Support

Smart City

Inspiration

We were inspired by the ProfHacks Cares, the Smart Cities of Tomorrow track, and the Best Hack for Social Good.

What it does

Our group tried to look for a good solution that involved the ProfHacks Cares initiative. We were able to create a service that has the potential to be deployed into cities around the nation. This service would allow people in need of essential life necessities to receive goods that include things like food, hygiene products, clothing, and anything else that businesses are willing to donate. The whole project would rely on companies and small businesses (Sponsors) making donations to food banks and other charitable "businesses" (Warehouses). Our service allows the Sponsors to create donations that Warehouses are then able to claim so that the Sponsors would know which distributers want their specific donations delivered to. This part heavily depended on which types of donations Providers could provide and which types Warehouses could receive. Users would then access our web app to locate Warehouses locally that have the specific item that they are looking for. We had the idea that the web app could be accessed by anyone anonymously so that people would not be deterred or embarrassed when trying to use it. We also had the idea that there could be kiosks with sole access to the web app, in convenient locations, such as local public transportation stops.

How I built it

We implemented City Support using Node.js as the back-end, and HTML, CSS3 and JQuery for front-end. Additionally, we hosted our project using the Google Cloud Platform. To best describe our data, we used MySQL.

Challenges I ran into

One of our biggest challenges was, designing our relational database. In almost every iteration of the model, we came across an anomaly that contradicted our database design.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud of the system's design and our ability to pick up new skills quickly during this project.

What I learned

We learned a lot about databases and how to use procedures in MySQL. We also learned how to build a framework to do exactly what we wanted it to do.

What's next for City Support

Our next for the City Support is to collect user data to better understand our society's needs, provide more variety of sponsors and donations, and apply our system to a greater scale.