Culture Compass

Culture Compass is a website that helps reconnect you with your heritage by letting you post and find the nearest of a diverse range of ethnic events to immerse yourself in traditions and heritage.

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Inspiration

Canada is known for its rich diversity of cultures across the provinces. This is a good thing because you are exposed to a variety of cultures. However, many of us end up losing touch with the rest of our culture as we become less exposed to spending time with others in our own community. This often results in people wanting to regain their knowledge and participating in their culture. However, it can be very hard to find such events without prior knowledge and/or connections to these events. So, we thought of creating Culture Compass, a site where you can easily reconnect with your roots by immersing yourself in your culture and being around others that you can connect to.

What it does

The goal of Culture Compass is to help people who want to connect back with their culture and learn about their culture. It aims to do this by completing 2 things: by having a platform for organizers to reach the correct audience, and by showing users the closest events they can attend. Culture Compass brings forth opportunities for people to connect with their communities and allows them to be part of their culture. Additionally, Organizers can create events for those in their communities, knowing that any others are aware of the event. Our vision is to help maintain the diversity of the place that we call home.

How we built it

Culture Compass is built upon the Streamlit framework to create a web application. This allowed us to set the page up within a few minutes, and was customizable for what we needed to do. Additionally we are using the OpenCage Geocoding API to get information of the latitude and longitude of cities, so we can calculate the nearest events.

Challenges we ran into

Due to this being our group’s first hackathon, we stumbled across many challenges, both with our project and outside of the project. Throughout our brainstorming process, we came up with many ideas for our projects and were not able to land on just one. But with the looming time constraint, we knew we had to work with the strengths of our members if we wanted to complete our project. Additionally, we wanted to try our hand at every framework we had access to, but along with the idea, we decided on something that would be within reach of what we wanted to accomplish. Throughout the project design, implementation and testing, we found many obstacles that hindered our progress. A major obstacle we ran into was pivoting from gathering information from the internet and using the platform to also add events. Originally, we wanted to find the closest events through the websites of the closest cities. However we quickly realized that it was way too much and would not be worth it as each website would have their information differently.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As said in the previous question, this was our group’s first time participating in a hackathon. Our main goals were to have fun, make connections, and finish at least at a minimum viable product. Looking back now that we are near the end of this hackathon, we would all say that we knocked off everything on our list. We met so many amazing people, learned a bunch of lessons, and came up with a project all of us enjoyed working on, while having fun every step of the way!

What we learned

This hackathon provided us the opportunity to learn a variety of skills, frameworks, and lessons. We learned how to work together as a team to split up and plan projects so that it becomes manageable. We learned how to become adaptable when facing obstacles in our way to success. Another thing we learned was using git for version control, Figma for prototyping, and Streamlit for webapps.

What's next for Culture Compass

Culture Compass is far from being completed, and we have many goals for its future. We plan to expand our database, provide more information about each culture, and enhance user experience. To build upon our database, we plan to reach farther than Ontario, having events all across nationally and eventually, globally. Furthermore, we expect to help those who want to learn more about their culture by giving them information on their culture. Having a page dedicated to resources to learn more on each culture is something beneficial for not only someone wanting to reconnect with their roots, but anyone who is interested in learning about humanity’s rich cultural differences. Finally, we intend to enhance user experience through improves UI/UX, aesthetics, advanced searching tools and more. Ultimately, in the future we expect to branch out of Ontario, provide more cultural resources, and generally improve user experience.

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