Github Link - https://github.com/priyanshu20/Hackathon

Inspiration

A trivial help from your end might make someone's day and most of us are willing to help. Introducing "Help Vault" a platform to facilitate us give and take. Setting up a video conference to teach a class might be easy for you but for someone it can be a nightmare, we wanted to build something that connects these parties/ Also during emergencies every second counts so we also try to tackle that by notifying others nearby.

What it does

Provides a platform to allow people to easily offer and receive help. Even Allows us to swiftly spread word of an emergency and minimize as much of a damage as we can before professionals are called.

How We built it

For building Help Vault we used Kotlin language for building a user friendly native android application with a simple but attractive interface. At the backend we used Node.js and Express.js to prepare a RESTful API to process requests the backend was connected to a MongoDB database using the Mongoose ORM to assist us in writing queries.

The workflow

This is community based app in which people can ask for help from volunteers who are willing to do so. From our platform, one can create a general purpose requirement giving details of the task he needs help in and the number of volunteers he need. This requirement is then visible to people nearby (a fixed distance) who when click on it are redirected to google maps displaying the location where they have to go. Another important feature is if anyone is in emergency, he/she can press the emergency button available in app which sends a priority notification to nearby people who can approach the needful.

Challenges We ran into

Being a location based app, one of the most important area of consideration was playing with latitudes and longitudes. Sending coordinates continuously to maintain something close to real time location for better effectiveness of app. In this, mongo’s documentation and stack overflow helped a lot. Another thing was that half of our team wasn’t familiar with github and collaborating remotely was a great challenge. Then it took a while to figure out the UI that felt good and is practical in implementation.

Accomplishments that We’re proud of

As a whole we completed most of the features we decided on Login Adding tasks we require help for Adding emergencies Pop up notification of emergencies Filtering volunteers based on location Displaying location of task/emergency on google maps

What We learned

To work in and as a team A brief knowledge about websockets and their integration in kotlin Some key concepts of UI/UX designing A bit about google maps API Using github in an efficient way How to work to get a task finished in deadline

What's next for Help Vault

We will be adding a feature for natives to chat and interact as if a group or others regularly help each other, they must be closely connected enough. If someone wants to thank or appreciate the volunteers they can provide prizes which volunteers can redeem. On a financial side even organizations can sponsor with special discounts . But the spirit is still volunteering for social good and not for prizes , so this is not final Some gamification features like the one with higher credits can unlock some cool in-App swags or titles that would be displayed besides users name.

Built With

• adobe-xd
• express.js
• kotlin
• mongodb
• mongoose
• nodej