Overview

Our team decided our efforts would be best suited to develop a GMU Carbon Emission Dashboard. We chose to solve this problem because by creating a tool to track and decrease the carbon emissions of GMU, it potentially also be used for awareness projects at GMU and other universities or companies. The overall goal we chose to hone in on was to aggregate relevant carbon emission data into comprehensive graphs. Using the Salesforce platform, we attempted to assemble a dashboard for analytical comparison of different fiscal years and an android app for an energy usage reduction competition.

The solution and its impact

The solution that we came to develop was to use a method of aggregating carbon emission data from GMU sources and displaying it to our users in an engaging way. If we can bring awareness to the GMU and its community about carbon emissions, that will subsequently decrease those emissions. We wanted to focus on the energy consumption of several GMU dorms and compare them since we believe GMU can focus on reducing carbon emission with a focus on these dorms.

What was our approach?

The team's first strategy was to start researching GMU's power consumption, waste management, and potential dashboard solutions. After our group was satisfied with our collaborative research, we then got into contact with Salesforce directly to understand their problem in detail and their expectations when it came to a final deliverable. Once our team collected sufficient information about the problem we aimed to solve, we started developing a framework to help us visualize and break down the problem. Our team naturally took it upon themselves to delegate aspects of the problem to solve. Creating public slides, documents, git repositories, and using the shared salesforce platform, we were able to collaborate and bounce off each other's work.

What makes our hack different?

Our problem aimed to prioritize representing the energy consumption of GMU to incentivize the university and students/faculty members to contribute to the power consumption reduction efforts. Our solution finds a different approach to the problem because we developed an interactive android app that both shows the analytical data and incentivizes those same users to be one # on the leaderboard by being the building that consumes the least energy.

Salesforce dashboard components

Tabs: campus summary and dorm summary Reports: One imported report electric consumption and waste summary Dashboard: We made a basic dashboard with the potential for more refinement.

Effort

The aspect that took a considerable amount of effort was creating the dashboard. Our team ran into several hangups since this was a new tool our team had been exposed to. Our team would have likely completed the dashboard and the android application if given more time. As well as exploring other areas including GMU waste management analytics, tapping into the IOS app market, and more profound development of the energy reduction competition.