Inspiration
There is currently a decline in the presence and accessibility of 'third places' - spaces outside of the home or work where people can go to interact with and be a part of their community - and an increase in loneliness and isolation among people in the US.
We wanted our site to facilitate people finding both these third places, and also local community organizations and clubs with the hope of allowing people to become more connected to those around them.
What it does
Our project utilizes Google Maps API to enable people to find nearby places according to a few entered criteria. We also have a communities tab with the goal of allowing local organizations and clubs to enter basic information such as a description of what they do and their meeting times.
Our homepage also offers recommendations of both a local community organization and a local third place. Our primary goal is to enable people to engage with their community. By suggesting specific recommendations rather than bombarding them with options, users will be more likely to congregate and meet new people at these locations.
How we built it
For Conventus, we built the front-end with JS, HTML, and CSS, while also integrating the Google Maps API to display our recommended locations based on the return data from the backend.
For the back-end we used Python and Flask to connect the front end and query the Google Maps API.
Challenges we ran into
One of our main challenges was that no one in our group had any significant front-end experience which made that part of the design process significantly more challenging, as we had to learn on the fly.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We used this hackathon as an opportunity to learn as much as we could about front-end design and we are proud of what we managed to do in the inherently limited timespan of a hackathon.
What we learned
Starting with next to no knowledge about front-end development we learned on the fly about making calls to our back-end proxy API in JS, and how to style and format our site using CSS and HTML.
What's next for Conventus
We have a lot of ideas on how to expand and improve Conventus. One of the main ideas here would be to enable local communities to create postings and have them show up on the communities tab. Additionally, we would like to be able to return a ranked recommendation list based on the input in the third places tab, but due to how Google has set up its API pricing, we had to limit ourselves to only returning one result.
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