Households Items sharing

An application that facilitates sharing household items within a local community.

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Inspiration

During this Covid 19 crisis, the economy has been hit very hard. Many of our friends lost their source of income and others lost their jobs. Those folks are struggling every day and don't know how to get by especially how to feed their families.

There are also people who are most vulnerable like the elderly, those with chronic illnesses, or those in quarantine. They are isolated from the world to avoid being exposed to Covid-19. Most of those people need help with getting basic household items.

On another hand, many people bought and stocked a lot of household items to avoid running out. Those folks may have some extra goods that they are feeling the need to donate or share with the community.

An application we are building will connect those who are in need and those who have excess who are willing to donate. It will provide the ability to donate or request any household item.

What it does

The app provides the following features:

  1. Anyone can post an item in which she or he would like to donate (Meals, Toothpaste, Diapers, toilet papers, etc...)
  2. Anyone can post a request for an item for which he or she is in need.
  3. The app will display available items to anyone who is in need.
  4. The person in need will be able to contact the donor and they will arrange the drop and pick up of item of the donated item.

How we built it

Our prototype offers both a web app and a desktop application. The web app is built using react-bootstrap and we leverage electron to build desktop applications. We used React to be able to reach a wide range of devices, we plan to support android and ios phones in the near future.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Hosting the application in the cloud is expensive.
  2. Communities with slow internet connections or complete lack of internet would not be able to use our application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. We are proud of our prototype! We look forward to releasing it to the community and starting to fight COVID-19.

What we learned

  1. Though people collect goods at mass out of fear, they are also willing to sharing them and donating them to those who are in need. Our hope is that our platform will facilitate this act of nobility.
  2. When a crisis happens, it impacts all of us, we have to work together to get it solved.

What's next for Households Items sharing

  1. Improving the algorithm to make it work with high volumes of requests.
  2. Releasing our application to production.
  3. Supporting android and ios phones.
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