CrowdHost

Inspiration

We play ultimate Frisbee, and often attend tournaments out of town. There are plenty of people who live near the tournament location and would be happy to host visiting teams, but they have no way to connect with each other.

What it does

Our application allows tournament directors to register tournaments on our site. Once that is done, teams can register to be hosted and hosts can register their available space. Once the tournament's registration deadline arrives, the tournament director uses the app to match teams to available hosts.

How we built it

We built our application in Python using the Django framework.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was developing the algorithm for matching hosts with teams. We also had some networking troubles when deploying our site (it's always DNS).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The algorithm we used to match teams and hosts was complicated to develop while considering both business logic and performance optimizations. In the end we came up with a solution that matches our business requirement of teams that register first having priority while also producing a relatively optimized solution in terms of not wasting host space.

What's next for CrowdHost.Us

Expand Target Market

Our next step is to make the site more generic and less focused on ultimate. We believe that the concept we came up with has potential for any type of event. Unlike other platforms that offer crowd-sourced housing, we match people who are interested in, and probably participating in, the same type of event. In other words, the people who are hosting are typically also attending the event that the guests are.

Notifications

Right now users have to check back frequently to see if matches have been generated and if the user's host/team was matched. In the future we would like to implement email notification for this functionality.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• ansible
• bootstrap
• css
• django
• google-maps
• html
• python
• terraform