Hacking Homelessness

Inspiration

We want to accelerate the decrease of the homeless population by giving them opportunities to get back into the workforce and by guiding them to resources that will allow them to reach their goals. We also allow for the homeless to create a profile for themselves so that eventually negative social stigma against homelessness (e.g. homeless people are dangerous, being homeless is the homeless person's fault), will become fade away.

How it works

Hacking Homelessness is a website that connects the homeless to shelters and possible sponsors to give them the support they need to stand on their own. Using the geo-location of where the homeless access the internet, we link him/her to the nearest shelter that provides the necessities they need. Then by either creating a Facebook account or logging into an existing one, we extract data from Facebook to create a profile on our website that tells potential supporters their story. After asking him/her questions about her background, aspirations, and everything in between, we create a biography using speech-to-text conversion (from IBM BlueMix) match them to a job using the personality insight service (again from BlueMix) to help the homeless person figure out a valuable skill they want to pursue. Then donors can look through various homeless peoples' profiles to see who they want to support.

Challenges I ran into

Inexperience. Only one person in the team knew web development. Everyone in the team only knew C++, which is not even used for web development. 3 members of the team were a first-time hacker. For these reasons, many features that we would have liked to implement were improbable to execute with our low knowledge level. In addition, BlueMix's services didn't work for us.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Even with almost literally no web development experience, we still managed to push out an okay looking and functional website. Creating something from scratch, especially something that we had absolutely no idea about, was a very challenging and rewarding experience.

What I learned

On top of learning new programming languages like Python, we also learned the basics of web development by trying out node.js, mongodb, and making a database out of flask and MySQL. Also, hackathons are awesome.