Digital Square

We have built a small-business discovery ecosystem that allows users to easily explore and buy from local commerce and assists small-businesses through the connecting power of technology.

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Inspiration

As a result of the pandemic and the consequent lockdowns, many family-owned and small businesses have faced the prospect of losing clients and have struggled to reach out to new customers. Furthermore, their lack of resources and expertise in technical domains presents a significant hurdle that can prevent their adoption of digital solutions, which has been a critical asset in softening the financial impact of the pandemic on many businesses. We hope that our solution to these issues will continue to make a difference, even as the pandemic eases, by facilitating collaboration between small businesses, introducing consumers to new, interesting goods and services, and by ensuring that small businesses get the exposure they deserve.

We have placed the ideal of social good at the heart of Digital Square. Our mission statement is to help elevate small businesses and protect the hard-earned livelihoods of those who do so much for our culture and our economy. We do this in three key ways: Firstly, we introduce a 'karma' economy of favours, whereby businesses can help each other prosper and thereby earn 'karma' points which increase their ranking in the system. Secondly, we foster collaboration between members of the community and businesses through 'Community Hero' tasks that can help small businesses prosper. Both avenues combine to exult the transactions of reciprocal kindness that we expect to foster on Digital Square. Finally, our platform strives to support 'Underrepresented Entrepreneurs' (Wishart, 2018) by giving small business owners the option to self-identify under any one or more of the underrepresented entrepreneurs categories (Migrant Entrepreneurs, Women Entrepreneurs, Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurs, and more) in order to facilitate more focussed efforts by government bodies to financially support them and to increase their visibility to patrons on the platform.

What it does

Our ecosystem provides an ideal space for small businesses to advertise themselves very easily as most of their information is scraped from various datasets publicly available on the internet.

We hope that the platform's local search engine and business home pages will generate network effects within the small business community. The 'karma' mechanism could help motivate and facilitate collaborative efforts between businesses - two local bakeries might arrange to coordinate their delivery efforts for example.

From a customer standpoint, our ecosystem provides several appealing factors, such as the benefit of supporting your local community in a time of crisis, ease of use, respect for privacy, and a searching and localisation system.

Perhaps wanting to take their contribution to small businesses a step further, customer's could opt to fulfil a 'Community Hero' task listed on a company's home page.

How we built it

We built our solution using Django for the back-end and Bootstrap/HTML/CSS for the front-end and NLP for the search engine (sklearn). We used Google's Place API to systematically scrape the web for business information to populate our database.

Challenges we ran into

Structuring the workload, finding which datasets could be valuable, ensuring the data was clean and processed correctly, designing an interface that could be used with ease.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building an end-to-end project that already provides value by using real-life data, a high degree of automation and all with the goal of doing social good.

What we learned

Teamworking skills, database structuring, UX/UI, NLP, Python and Django, intersection of technology prowess and the potential to employ this technology to drive social change in times of economic turbulence.

What's next for Digital Square

Deploy already-coded search engine that uses reviews to recommend establishments. Increase the amount of automation, create a sign in system for users and companies. Allow companies to upload their own products and label them. Create a point system with 'karma' to incentivise volunteering and collaboration across members of the community.

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