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example data uploaded on google earth
Inspiration
Our team was inspired by Seohyeon's experience: "I came up with this idea when I found out my college promised to make free menstrual products accessible but it wasn’t happening. Many dispensers were constantly empty. Even though some places did have free products, I didn’t know where they were. So I thought it’d be great if we could make a map where everyone can edit and find information like this. I expanded my idea to include a wider range of basic needs like food, water, and access to bathrooms.
Emily joined and built upon her mutual aid experience where neighbors helped each other in their own communities to access available resources, such as food, groceries, and household items from food pantries and other free community resources.
Our project aims to protect and support each other in our own communities and worldwide, particularly in our most vulnerable populations. We are working to support people through crowdsourcing available resources in a community (such as free menstrual products, meals, groceries/food pantries, the location of accessible bathrooms, overnight shelters, and other resources. We are committed to leveraging the strength of our community to support each other.
What it does
Maargdarshak: Community Connect is a website where people can upload the location and type of resource available in any community and other users are able to see those resources (type, location, hours) that are available within a community.
How we built it
Our website, Maargdarshak (the .tech domain we wanted to register but couldn't), which means "One Who Shows the Path" in Hindi, is built in Wix using Velo for an interactive map of community resources as well as with Twilio. We attempted to incorporate Twilio so that members of a community could upload geo-data directly to the map integration on our website.
We created a group forum for users who are unable to get to the resources in their community can text or call members of the community who are located near the resources and are willing to bring food, groceries, menstrual products, etcetera to those who need assistance.
Challenges we ran into
It was difficult to work across three different time zones.
We're all new to hackathons, so that was a big challenge!
We wanted to create a data pipeline (see second image) to automatically convert google spreadsheet data to kml format and embed it to google maps, but we found out google maps api doesn't support automating this. We reduced the scope of the project to deal with this issue. We are aware that ArcGIS provides similar functionalities but we were not able to use it since it's paywalled.
We could not incorporate Twilio like we wanted to.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We got the bare bones of our site up and the code is working sometimes. We embedded sample data into Google Earth (third image)
What we learned
We learned to work as a team. Learned about APIs and JavaScript. Learned about connecting user input data to maps and websites.
What's next for Maargdarshak: Community Connect
We have a lot of work to do to bring this concept to fruition. We are planning to continue collaborating beyond this hackathon.
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