Clean Up Crew

Inspiration

Imagine a small food desert town in Arizona, whose residents don't have access to the same nutritious produce. In a nearby town, there's a small family-run business that specializes in gardening. We wanted to connect the two.

What it does

Clean Up Crew connects small communities wanting to improve their localities and small businesses seeking opportunity in today's harsh economy. Community members can post issues on our app. Other members can like or fund issues in the community. Individual contractors can access this market through the app to get jobs in their local areas. Once they select a job and complete it, community members can verify the job and the contractor gets paid.

How we built it

We built a mobile-oriented responsive web app using Nextjs. Our backend database was powered by MongoDB. We also utilized Amazon EC2 for image upload optimization and Google Cloud API for Google Map geolocation services.

Challenges we ran into

This hackathon was eventful. We've had our fair share of merge conflicts, bad API calls, and sleep deprivation. We utilized perseverance, positivity, and lots of caffeine to ultimately overcome them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of creating a full-stack application where our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) functions! We're also really happy we learned new tools and utilized old skills efficiently.

What we learned

One takeaway from Hack GT 9 would be to balance efforts on all aspects of the app. In this hackathon, we focused primarily on developing the backend whilst the front end was left for last. In the future, we want to spend the first few hours planning our approach better.

What's next for Clean Up Crew

Clean Up Crew and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are a match made in heaven. This technology will allow trustless, truly decentralized payments between community members and contractors. This will also allow members to perform validation of the issues they back and increase security against fraud. We would also look forward to working with local governments to facilitate some of these developments to make regulatory compliance easier, and perhaps provide them with a more efficient way of knowing which issues are relevant to their community. In the future, we hope to make this app accessible on all major platforms and make it something truly capable of changing the way we invest in issues that are important to us.