ShelterRide Network

ShelterRide Message to HP

Inspiration

The homeless innovation landscape, meeting and working with new people, 16 year old dev rockstars and the creative minds of our resident multi-potentialites.

What it does

ShelterRide helps homeless people (HP) find and get a lift to the RIGHT shelter. The process starts when a community stakeholder registers a HP on the ShelterRide network and provides the HP with a phone (recycled from donations and linked to the registered data on the network). The HP immediately uses the phone to send a text to ShelterRide. The ShelterRide Dispatch Bot uses logic to find a compatible shelter based on the phone lookup / HP registration data and compares this to the attributes and current capacity of shelters on the network. Once a shelter is found, the ShelterRide Dispatch Bot kicks off a series of transactions to send messages to Uber (pickup request), the shelter (pending arrival notice) and the HP (Uber is on the way). The current capacity of the shelter is adjusted allowing for subsequent real-time inquiries to reflect accurate availability. Then Uber collects the HP from their current location and drops them at the designated shelter, where they will checkin and completes the HP's intake form.## How we built it We timeboxed our activities, starting with the goal setting and ideation phase. We insisted on having a minimum of 3 viable ideas before deciding where to land. We storyboarded the concept collectively, identified expected user interactions and then outlined the technical tasks to execute. We used Angular and Material Design for the front end UI forms, Firebase as the ShelterRide network database - and backend system. Because we are using SMS to communicate between all users of ShelterRide, we use Twilio. Two and 1/2 days later... we have a working ShelterRide prototype.