HACKMIT-smoothieClub

parkMIT started as an idea for the Urban Innovation track. We wanted to do something that involved the community and improved day-to-day life: parkMIT is the idea of keeping an updated map of the parking spots around campus.

The idea is that whenever someone parks around Cambridge, you'd mark where you park and get rewarded for providing info about that location: how many spots are still available? is there a toll? how long will you take the spot and when will you leave so it will become available for someone else?

With that, you would be given Beaver Bucks (or rather, brownie points, since we didn't know how to implement a reward system/ incentive for using parkMIT).

parkMIT was a challenge to implement: we wanted to make an app, but couldn't use Android or iPhone dev languages to implement it- next best was a Web App. That didn't come to fruition either, so we made a python program. We also realized we couldn't use a real p2p network either in such a short time, so we made data points around campus and randomized those points (based on a time-seed) to emulate that there would be more or less parking spots in certain spots throughout the day. Account data is stored plain-text and parking nodes are stored in plain-text too; we just didn't want to deal with online databases.

In short, parkMIT is an idea that looks promising. With many peers on an actual working network and high rates of usage, finding the ideal parking in Cambridge would be easier than currently done. Go Beavers!

Built With

• python