Community Service Finder

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  Url: https://hpv8hfuva.github.io/WiCSHackathon.github.io/

Inspiration

We were inspired to do a community service finder because many of our friends are into volunteering, but they constantly have trouble finding opportunities to help. Many organizations that host such volunteering activities do not have a lot of accessible information, and we wish to remedy this by providing a service that intuitively allows users to easily find such opportunities on a simple interface.

What it does

Our project is a website, and it allows users to see all community service locations located within their specified distance. Markers will appear for all community service opportunities within the maximum distance and the user can easily access the name, address, phone number, email, and the website of the organization to learn more information about the opportunity.

How I built it

Our application was a website. We used html, javascript, google map APIs, and the bootstrap library to create the overall functionality of our website, allow the toggling of a map and geocoding addresses, and styling the website to make it look appealing to the user.

Challenges I ran into

As it was a new experience developing in javascript and using external resources such as google geolocation apis. We had to iron out a lot of the confusion at the beginning of the hackathon. A lot of time was spent learning how to properly format the functions and code in order to create a working set of features that we outlined at the beginning of the hackathon. We ran into a lot of trouble with bootstrap near the end due to formatting issues and weeding out the errors in our project surrounding the API limitations.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This one of our first experiences developing a program that utilized features such as geolocation and applying our knowledge of limited javascript. However, we are proud that we successfully created a working prototype of our community service finder. Our team was able to accomplish far more than we had anticipated coming into the hackathon.

What I learned

We were able to learn a lot about how to use the google maps api and the geoencoder api. We were also able to learn a lot more about javascript, and throughout coding the website, we were able to get a lot more comfortable with javascript and its syntax. We were able to gain more exposure to different html components as well as more familiarity with the different tools in the bootstrap library.

What's next for Community Service Finder

When we designed Community Service Finder, we felt that it was important to match __ people to a cause that they believe in. Currently, our project has limited amounts of data on nearby community services, but we hope to push forward by finding more insightful data on up-coming opportunities. We felt that our current catalog of opportunities coupled with the location of these opportunities fit well with our goals. However, with more time we plan to implement filters and tags that would better pair helpers with their desired services. There are an abundance of resources and opportunities online, but many people find it difficult to navigate to these opportunities. We hope that our project can continue to simplify this struggle, in order to match every organization to individuals that best align with their values.

Built With

• bootstrap
• google-geoencoding-api
• google-maps
• html
• javascript