Community Star

Signup Page
Dashboard

Inspiration

All of us use open source software in our everyday life. But how cool would it be if we can contribute back it. Contributing to open source is a way of giving back to the ever helpful tech community that has helped millions start their journey in the tech industry for free. Contribution to open source is great feeling for both beginners and experts of the field. Contribution to real world projects will boost the confidence of beginners who would otherwise be wasting their time watching endless tutorial videos on YouTube. Experts/Pro can give give back to the community by putting use their experience. Currently there is no platform to search open source projects to contribute to. We decided to do something about it. We wanted to build a platform where any person can choose a project that we wants to contribute to based on the difficulty level. That's how Community Star was born.

What it does

Anyone can sign-up on the website using Github and list their project or search for projects to start contributing to. We don't discriminate people based on their knowledge or experience. Beginners with very little knowledge or experts are all the same to us. We are just looking for people with passion to contribute to Open source software. After signing up people can browse through all the projects that have been listed on the site. Then they can take a look at the technologies used and the Github page of the project to decide if they want to contribute to it. All the projects they volunteer to contribute show up in their dashboard.

How we built it

We started with planning the features, design and technologies to be used in the project . Firstly we divided the work amoung us. 2 member worked on backend Django and Sqlite, 1 member on open source documentations, 1 member on frontend HTML/CSS/JS. we created github repository and contributed together. We planned to keep github auth for login and were able to implement it. Next step was to setup database(Sqlite), store related data and display them accordingly wherever needed. Meanwhile Frontend was designed and reviewed. Next step was to deploy, we selected Heroku as platform and we faced some issues here, but we were to debug them and deploy it successfully.

Challenges we ran into

We had decided to use Github and google authentication for signing up to the website. But we ran into some problems while using google authentication and hence decided to go with only Github authentication. One other major challenge we faced was UI/UX design. None of us in the group where good with it and hence had some trouble making our website beautiful. Later on while deploying our project onto Heroku we again faced some problems. The site was not rendering the bootstrap, so we had to resolve that error.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The biggest thing we are proud of is the idea itself. The idea that will bring millions of developers aboard open source platform. This is a way for us to help the community that has helped us immensely. We are also proud of the fact that we built an fully functional website in only 2 days and also were able to host it. We learnt some completely new things from scratch and used it to build this amazing project.

What we learned

Working with such tight time constraints definitely taught us time management. Since we were working in a group we had to learn how to use Github to do collaborations. For the deployment process we had to learn how to use heroku deployment. For the authentication process we had used github auths, so we learned the process of using it

What's next for Community Star

Going forward we would like to implement features like rewarding contributors with badges to showcase it to the world, create a leader board of people with highest contributions in a week/month/year. Features such as workshops and tutorials from experienced developers to help novice developers get started with their contribution can also be added.