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Team
Inspiration
Every day there is a chance a disaster may loom at the next corner. When a disaster strikes a lot of people panic and call 911 and the lines could impede emergency services from reaching impact areas immediately. We thought the best way to alert proper authorities was to create an app that lets users click and report a disaster at there location
What it does
DisWatch is a web app that relies on crowdsourcing to immediately alert the users of potential disasters that may be close using the user's geodata. Based on user reports DisWatch, the users' latitude, longitude, time, date, and disaster type will warn other users that a hazard may be nearby. Additionally, DisWatch stores data and over time will create an easy to use a public dataset that would record natural disasters.
How I built it
DisWatch was built by using React, FireBase Cloud FireStore, and the Google Maps API.
Challenges I ran into
Traditionally a website made with a front-end, back-end, and database. However, the constraints of a time-limited 36-hour event limit what solutions are possible such as learning and setting up a backend. The initial hurdle was how to store data the user reports. Then we discovered Firebase, Firebase turned to be our solution to a backend and database. However, at first, we were using the Firebase Realtime Database which was hard to set up due to not knowing what format the JSON. Then we settled on using Firebase Cloud Firestore because we could add and parse the data without worrying about the JSON structure.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We made a web app that is scalable and contains a dataset that only improves base on more people to adopt the platform
What I learned
We learned the Google Maps API for JavaScript and the Firebase Cloud FireStore
What's next for DisWatch
The scalability of DisWatch is endless. DisWatch could expand to more disasters than that are listed. DisWatch could expand to anything the user wants to report based on a location
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