divercity

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  divercity

Inspiration

Being a womxn living in a metro city and stepping out of one’s place after the dark can be an extreme sport. Much of the inspiration for our product ‘divercity’ app comes from our own personal experience. I remember how my college dorm whatsapp group used to be flooded with cautionary tales warning fellow dormmates against visiting certain ‘shady’ bars outside the college campus. The whatsapp group became a support network of womxn having encountered similar experiences and navigating through challenges in maintaining a work-life balance post classes. We realised that visibility of such information should be increased as more womxn could benefit from it. And thus, the idea behind ‘divercity’ was conceived.

What it does

The name brilliantly underscores the mission of our product. We aim to make all urban spaces in the city equally accessible for every community. Through a democratized information sharing platform (through reviews and ratings) we are essentially recreating what our dorm whatsapp group did back in college. We have extended the same to different marginalized communities. The most valuable resource is the proprietary data collected through our app. Information about accessibility and safety of different urban areas for different minority communities is not available anywhere, primarily because one’s cultural identity is sensitive information. We tried to circumvent privacy issues by maintaining anonymity and not collecting PII (personally identifiable information) from the user, so much that the user need not even create an account to use the app. The poses challenges such as quality and authenticity of data which we feel can be mitigated once we achieve scale, given the app is rooted in public good :)

How we built it

Time constraint was a challenge. Hence, we built a web application using Flask framework in python as a proof of concept with the eventual goal of building a native mobile app, since we envision the final product as a mobile app. Moreover, we also built insightful visualization on the Police Incidents since 1988 Urbana dataset. We intend to overlap this data with the ratings data collected through our own app and calculated ‘Safety Scores’ for geo-locations within a city (streets, markets, commercial complexes etc.)

Challenges we ran into

Just like any other technologies that require large amount of data, this product will also be affected by the virtuous/vicious cycle of data. That is for better performance and accurate ratings, you would need more data i.e. more user participation and a larger user base. And to build this user base, you need a well functioning and accurate app. For this reason, we would expect it to take more time to reach the adoption levels that can ensure effective operation. The second limitation is a result of our decision to do away with user data collection. We can't verify the authenticity of the data but this is a tradeoff we are willing to make now because we believe the proportion of spam will be inconsequential with a large enough database

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of being able to complete a Proof of concept and Minimum Viable Product (web app) around a solution involving all the stakeholders (the community, the municipality and private business owners). We were ourselves amazed by how well we could stick to our timeline and plans. We ended up completing all the targets that we had initially set for us. Another thing we are proud of is our future product vision and roadmap to solve problems like inequitable access to resources and marrying data and technology to solve pressing problems like isolation from the community

What we learned

All three members of our team have a technical background, so our first experience with product design and wireframe tools like figma was enlightening. The market research that we performed for this problem gave us some really interesting insights. We learned a lot through the various talks that were part of the event, about how data can be a powerful tool for uncovering latent problems within the community, through our app rating system we intend to collect more proprietary data and improve the quality of the same eventually for building robust model and power cutting edge analytics. The most important lesson of all was translating problems in personal experience to full scale solution from which community can benefit

What's next for divercity

The potential of this data is immense in the sense that it can inform and aid in urban planning and municipal decision making. For instance, improvement of infrastructure to promote participation from the elderly and differently abled in the public sphere. Moreover for businesses to gauge their performance and build an inclusive brand image. Through this app our mission is to bring about a cultural shift by involving all the stakeholders- the businesses, the municipal authorities and the community. Because when all are included, society as a whole benefits for the better.

Built With

• flask
• google-geocoding
• python