Greenspace

Inspiration

Greenspace is inspired by this year's track Towards a More Sustainable Future, sponsored by Georgetown University's Office of Sustainability. Three of the members on our team are Georgetown students, and all of us have experienced the continual degradation of the environment in the name of convenience, consumerism, and corporate profit.

Much of our environment's degradation, its symptoms, and its causes, can be found on social media, where perpetual cycles of trendiness have produced a culture of fast fashion that relies heavily on synthetic materials and environmentally nonsustainable business practices. Chronic social media usage has also inculcated a generation of individuals to be less aware of the world around them and more willing to push away environmental problems --- rather than facing them head-on --- by escaping to the internet.

In creating Greenspace, we seek to push back against corporate and consumeristic exploitation of the environment, bring awareness to the world and issues that pervade it, and reshape social media as a tool for social good by creating an app that encourages individuals to: 1) take action in their community, 2) connect and be inspired by the actions of others, and 3) look up from the screen and see the green and lush world around them while also coming to understand how the phone in their hand can nevertheless be a powerful force for beautifying that world.

What it does

Greenspace allows users to take photos of themselves engaging in environmentally friendly activities from recycling to using sustainable products to engaging in conservation projects like planting trees. These photos are then evaluated by Google Gemini AI to understand their environmental impact, and the user is awarded a number of points according to Gemini's evaluation. These contribute to the user's overall green score, which acts as a way for users to understand and feel good about their environmental contributions. Users can also join communities where their photos are displayed on a common feed and green scores are shown on a leaderboard. Through the community function, users can connect with each other, inspire others and feel inspired by the actions of others, and acquire a greater awareness of the environment in their community.

How we built it

The frontend of our app is written in TypeScript with React, and we used Vite for our development server. Several other React libraries like lucide-react are used for premade icons and components. The backend server is hosted on Replit using NodeJS, and it implements a REST API. We use Replit's own integrated database for storage and Replit's Google Gemini AI integration to call Gemini in a keyless fashion. The Replit server uses Drizzle to interact with the database through type-safe SQL-like queries.

Challenges, Accomplishments, and What we Learned

We'll admit it: we're newbies. For some of us, this is our first hackathon. For all of us, it was a learning curve in teamwork, project design, implementation, deployment, debugging, and managing emotions while under pressure. To that end, we're proud to have made it through this hackathon with an idea that we can call our own and a prototype that mostly works, most of the time. We also found a great deal of joy and inspiration in the theme of social good for this hackathon. The act of writing code becomes so much more meaningful when we can tell ourselves (delusional or not) that we are not only striving for our own improvement, but also for the good of our community and perhaps even the world as a whole.

Built With

• gemini
• node.js
• react
• replit
• typescript
• vite