Grapevine

Grapevine logomark
color palette
website preview

Inspiration

Grapevine came to fruition because we were sick of hearing “well that problem doesn’t happen here” when these events of sexual harassment and microaggressions happen every day in and around the RIT community. Both creators have experienced these types of aggressions and want to create something that helps prove that these types of acts happen nearly every day around the community.

What it does

Grapevine takes the initiative to connect victims through their tragedies and start a conversation about the problem in their community through a visual representation via a heat map that plots locations of gender or race-based aggressions. The site also provides resources if incidents happen around RIT and the greater Rochester area. As well as provides some educational content of what sexual harassment, racism, and any general microaggressions are and how to deal with the trauma during and after the event.

How we built it

We used an agile and iterative design process. Going back and forth between planning, hashing out ideas in Figma, implementing the ideas, testing using TDD, and then redesigning to continue the cycle again.

Challenges we ran into

Locally storing the data and form validation was a tricky thing to fix. Plus one partner is new to hackathons and got to implement the first UI that she designed in full. That took some time and patience but both partners worked together and reached out to mentoring resources around them to fix the problems at hand.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

On the front-end side, Olivia was proud this was one of her first UI's she's designed that got fully implemented. She had to use a lot of problem-solving skills and adapt some of the designs to fit the current programming level she is at. She is proud of her ability to adapt and also push her boundaries of programming skills a bit. Her programming skills got tested by not folding under pressure and kept working on finding a way to implement her design just as it was. Lily was proud of her ability to push through pages on pages of documentation for the Google Maps API in order to get the map working and displaying in the way that we wanted, logging the information we wanted in a way that was still friendly to the user.

What we learned

As mentioned before, half of this partnership was brand new to hackathons so together we learned a lot, especially about working under the pressure of a close deadline, of effective communication and division of tasks, of moving your plan through various stages to completion, and of course, the technical skills we were able to improve on.

What's next for Grapevine

We'd love to see Grapevine expand to larger communities focusing on bars, restaurants, schools, universities, cities, and office buildings, along with setting up a database to store the information from users so that the website can be used effectively as a way for others to tell their story and allow a very necessary conversation to take place.