Gimme Shelter

GimmeShelter provides information of shelters, food banks, health clinics, flu clinics, STD clinics, public restrooms, and condom distribution centers to individuals without access to the internet.

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Inspiration

My Alternative Spring Break trip from the Pennoni Honors College last year focused on homelessness. I spent a week living at a homeless shelter in Old City and each day would volunteer at a different food bank and shelter. I spent a lot of time sitting down with individuals who had no permanent residence and asked them if there was anything I could do to help. A lot of individuals mentioned that the only access they had to internet was via the public library or free internet kiosks; however, almost everyone had a private non-smartphone.

What it does

Gimme-Shelter provides users with information about local help centers through the use of SMS. Users subscribe to daily announcements and input parameters such as their age, number of dependents, gender, sexual orientation. Users can send an SMS to the Gimme-Shelter number and receive information back accordingly, whether it's number of remaining beds at the closest shelter, number of remaining flu shots, etc.

How we built it

We used google cloud to host a sql database and a vm instance. We then connected the sql database to the vm instance with firewall and routing rules. We used flask to host a server instance on the vm and utilized Twilio, Python, HTML, and Javascript to set up web routing and SMS routing. We also leveraged ML and Fuzzy Logic to parse user inputted passwords and provided custom real-time responses.

Challenges we ran into

Everything that could go wrong went wrong. -Murphy's Law Our Twilio account got suspended temporarily (twice)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating an SMS platform that hopefully will one day serve the city's less fortunate.

What we learned

Learned how to integrate Twilio with Google Compute Engine and SQL database Learned how to use Flask and set up web routing through it

What's next for Gimme-Shelter

Connect with food banks and homeless shelters to connect as many people as possible with the information they need in the best way possible.

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