Connect

Climate Connect: Empowering communities to take climate action.

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Inspiration

We wanted to develop a plan to establish Community Climate Resilience hubs to connect communities & to become more resilient, specifically in cases of emergency. The key issues are: LACK OF CONNECTION Residents are unaware of their neighbourhood MINIMAL EDUCATION PROVIDED mergency preparedness resources are not publicly available ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM Policies and practices that disproportionately impact BIPOC community REFINED IDEA A community hub with multiple chapters that is designed to prepare residents for a community crisis through trainings, resources and neighbour-to-neighbour connections. Residents can join on the website and select the topic in which they want to learn more about and discuss with other residents.

PROJECT SCOPE:

VULNERABLE COMMUNITIES Help people who need support by having affordable and equitable resources. BOTTOM-UP APPROACH Community-driven plans to increase engagement and involvement in the city. VIRTUAL-BASED Easy access to training and learning with others online.

Our Plan for rollout: PLANNING Contact stakeholders/partners Public outreach Maintain utility sectors e.g tool library RESPONSE Open emergency services Create emergency alerts
Natural disaster phase is indicated MITIGATION Establish hubs/chapters Rally points located Provide training RECOVERY Disaster support Revise emergency plan

What it does

Create Safe spaces for discussion Connect users together on video call on the website based on the community they want to join Enable users to access ressources Users can invite others to join through email

How we built it

Authentication: CockroackDB as a database to store user information. Video calling: WebRTC for a low latency peer-to-peer video calling connection. We also implemented socket.io to create the room call joining features where multiple users can join at the same time Video recording: We used the MediaStream recording API to trigger the screen recording from user browser to record the video Send Invitation: We used Twilio SendGrid to invite people to join the playing session. Frontend: We designed the UI/UX using Figma. After getting the final sketch, we used React, HTML, CSS to build the website and create complicated interactive features. Backend: We used Express, Node.js, and SQL for cockroachDB to build a server and host it in Heroku.

Challenges we ran into

Since our project was quite challenging, some of our members were forced to learn frontend technologies and style the website similar to our Figma, which was quite new to use and difficult. However, regardless of these challenges, we were able to pull through as we had a long- full-day zoom meeting where we spent them on debugging sessions and then finally have a working product in the end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of what we were able to do in such short time.

What we learned

WebRTC, front end and backend, APIS

What's next for Climate Connect

Adding more features!

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