Natural disasters may be rare, but they are almost always devastating, with many people in need because they lost their homes and livelihoods. Some organizations, such as restaurants and retail shops, sometimes are kind enough to open their doors to those who need it, providing free food, shelter, and clothing. However, with many forms of communication disabled because of the disaster, there should be a way to spread the message for these organizations. Enter DisasterCast.
Consumers type "add" to the DisasterCast number to be added to the subscription. Organizations can send a message to a different cell phone number, which then gets broadcasted to everyone who is in the subscription database.
For the front end and actual messaging, we used Twilio, a cloud communications platform. For the database, we used MongoDB.
One major challenge we ran into were the fact that both aspects of this project relied of platforms completely new to us, and both required relatively large learning curves, especially the databases. Also, the API Documentations were frequently out-of-date or did not work, so finding alternate ways to make code work was also a challenge.
We were able to learn two completely new frameworks, including databases, while making a useful and impactful service that can potentially improve hundreds of lives. That sense of completion and accomplishment is hard to surpass.
Future capabilities of DisasterCast would be to make it more feature-filled while still being based on SMS, as many people may not have other methods of communication. For example, it would be able to guide users to organizations through SMS.
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