GMe | Devpost

Inspiration

Every single year, the Canadian government has one billion dollars worth funds for youth, but sometimes they are left unclaimed. Besides, two people from our team have experienced searching and for applying documentation to the government, and none of us liked the long and intimidating reading dry legal documents. To get to know more about the problem, we made a small survey for Canada newcomers about government funding. Surprisingly, among 84.2% people who have never apply for government fund, 40% says the government website is confusing.

What it does

It is a web app in the survey form. It acts as a shortcut between the youth in need of money and funds. After the user fills in our survey with their conditions, the data will be matched with government funds in our database.

How we built it

The front-end was built with HTML and CSS. User data and government fund data is stored in real-time by Firebase. Our website is hosted by GitHub.

Challenges we ran into

We spent a great amount of time trying to host our website with Google Cloud Platform and Domain.com. After a long debugging process. The website worked. However, we decided to use GitHub instead. Besides, the government website has many funding programs in different areas, but each of them was digitalized differently in many user-unfriendly ways. For example, business funding has its own interactive survey form, while indigenous funding programs were listed as a huge list of postponed programs. It was a pain gathering database. Add onto that, our Firebase stopped connecting in the middle at night so we had to re-build it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very happy because we are able to shorten the searching process for a limited number of funding programs. Besides, the front-end look really nice in our opinion.

What we learned

Not only gained experience on the government website, but we also gain knowledge about the importance of understanding our problem from the user point of view. We also have a great time refreshing our experience with GitHub.

What's next for GMe

We want to expand our database, servers diverse groups of people in all areas. In a large scale, we want to build a platform that not only saves and matches user information but also saves legal documentation and automatically fills in matched forms, check the documentation packages to shorten the process of gathering documents, too.