Communal Kitchen

Inspiration

Oftentimes, people want to help out the homeless by buying them food. Unfortunately these meals end up lacking nutrition or cannot be eaten due to dietary restrictions. Communal Kitchen provides a platform for people in the local community to share home-cooked, personal meals to the homeless. This process is easily accessible to the homeless and helps foster closer relationships between them and their local community.

What it does

We are presenting an application wireframe as well as a detailed overview of our plan to implement Communal Kitchen. It is broken into three parts: Kiosk, App, and Database. We intend to develop cheap, self-sufficient kiosks with raspberry pi's that serve as a means for the homeless to request home-cooked meals as well as a safe location for said meals to be dropped off. These requests will be sent to a phone application where local members of the community can either choose to cook a requested meal or offer up one that has already been cooked (think making an extra portion for dinner to be donated). These two services are linked together through a database that organizes all the information so that each request can be fulfilled. To involve local businesses and encourage the community to provide local meals, we intend to create a dialogue between Communal Kitchen and businesses such as Catch 22, Cali n Titos, and many other locations to offer coupon incentives to app users in exchange for marketing abilities.

How we built it

Currently our project is a wireframe and a database outline. The database will be in MySQL and the kiosk interface will be written in HTML/PHP. The application will initially be built for iOS then extended to the Android market soon after.

Challenges we ran into

The most difficult part of this was refining our ideas so that it would be beneficial to the community. It was hard coming up with ideas to turn this into a "everyone wins" plan, and it involved a lot of creativity along the way.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we developed a complete strategy for implementing Communal Kitchen. While we did not particularly dive into the coding aspects, we have refined our project in such a way that from here we can easily complete aspects of it without design issues along the way. Within a month, we could feasibly have our project running and benefitting the community.

What we learned

We learned how to start of with an idea and develop it into a full project. We learned how to critically evaluate our idea and make compromises in order to create the best possible design to benefit the community we are targeting.

What's next for Communal Kitchen

From here, we intend to go into the community to begin developing the incentive part of our application. While doing this, we will begin prototyping kiosk designs and apply for various funding opportunities within the government and the university to help pick our project off the ground. Once we have gained community support (possibly through doing surveys to gain statistical backings) we can begin app development and advertising. Once our product is usable, we will connect with local homeless shelters to begin spreading the word about our project as well as find optimal locations to place our kiosks to reach as many people as possible.