CommUnity

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Inspiration

We wanted to develop a web app that makes finding volunteer opportunities easier. We thought that by simplifying the process, people would be more inclined to serve their communities.

What it does

It uses the VolunteerConnector API to show available volunteer opportunities. It also incorporates the gemini 2.5pro model to generate summaries of the volunteer opportunities, as they can be quite a bit verbose.

How we built it

We leveraged agentic IDEs (windsurf,cursor) to produce pretty much all of our code. We knew what we wanted to CommUnity to do and look like, so we expedited the process by prompt engineering.

Challenges we ran into

We had a finite amount of free prompt credits, which we ultimately ended up investing in more at the end because it meant having a working project or losing all our work. We also had trouble integrating gemini. There was a small bug in which we had to specify the exact model, in order for it to generate text. Lastly, setting up the blueprint for the project was really tedious, until we started using an agentic IDE (windsurf, cursor), that's when things really took off.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of our persistence. There were some setbacks along the way that nearly banished our project to the shadow realm. We were on the verge of giving up, but we persisted because despite what ChatGPT was telling us about the fate of our lost files, we kept trying and managed to recover it. We would not take no for an answer.

What we learned

We learned that you have to be really careful when it comes to version control. We went a long time without saving our work and we had no idea what we were saving at times. All our work was nearly lost in the end because of incompetence. Luckily, ai helped us recover our work. The biggest takeaway is that we need to become more proficient with github.

What's next for CommUnity

We wanted a working project so we held off on implementing more desired features, out of fear of getting last minute bugs. We wanted to personalize the volunteer experience. There was supposed to be a profile page with your stats (participations, events hosted, etc). We also wanted to implement a search and filter feature on the opportunities page to make the volunteering experience more convenient.