Culture Mesh

Inspiration

Helping new immigrants find info on great places to live in the US, catered to each individual.

What it does

It finds resources for your ethnicity/country for all metro areas in the US including restaurants, schools, churches and community activities that may be of interest to similar people who have recently immigrated to those areas.

How we built it

We started with MongoDB SaaS offering, MLab for our back end. We designed the document structure and created a sample document in our collection. One person proceeded to start designing the UI/UX and underlying JS/CSS architecture while the other 2 sought out data sources for what

Challenges we ran into

Data was hard to find, and often disparate. Each data source chose differently on how to break up cultures: by race, ethnicity or sometimes nationality. A single static data set for "resources" wasn't readily available either. A real world scenario would include community involvement to keep those resources up to date.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made what we think is very simple, easy to understand application that should get folks to the information they want to see, FAST.

What we learned

Data is so important and is the hardest thing to get. Application frameworks are becoming cleaner and easier to use, thus getting Minimum Viable Products completed faster than ever. Getting the right data is still challenging, even in 2018.

What's next for Culture Mesh

A wikipedia-like website that allows people in the COMMUNITY to keep the resources up to date. Community reviews of cities and the cultural sub-communities within. Immigration counselors could sponsor links and posts within the site.