Inspiration
The City of Boston has a large number of homeless people. Especially in the winter, it can be really hard to find a warm place to sleep, good nourishing food and also educational events that are offered. This is really unfortunate because there are so many great charities, events, and resources, that are scattered throughout the city and the internet. We wanted to make this valuable information more accessible, by gathering and putting this information together in order to make it just a little easier to find food or a warm bed in the Hub.
What it does
The website we've built provides a medium for those in need to find various resources such as food, shelter, healthcare, and community support. Additionally, organizations, families, students or whoever wants to give back to the community can register events and donations in seconds.
How we built it
We built the current version of the web app using the popular MEAN stack, with our database hosted on Microsoft Azure.
Challenges we ran into
Research: There is so much outdated information on the internet and it is hard to find things that are still going on. As most of us are beginners, learning new knowledge and applying them to the project is a challenge throughout the hackathon. Also, getting everyone in the team who works on different platforms and computers to be on the same page in term of project setting and configuration was also a big part.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We successfully built a functional base for our website where users can view different events going on in the city. The organizations can create an account and post their own events. We also created a chatbot on our Facebook page to provide users with answers to their questions instantly. We are in our process of implementing the scraping feature and though it still needs to be finished, we're proud that we had successfully scraped data from various sites.
What we learned
Shruthi learned to build a chatbot for the first time! Snehal learned how to scrape data from websites using Javascript. Sophie and Hannah learned HTML and CSS and Zee learned to use Angular.JS!!
What's next for Home in the Hub
We look forward to continuing to improve the website further. The goals are:
- A complete user-friendly website where users can see all events happening around the city easily
- Users can filter events by various categories
- Events are mapped to Google map properly
- Scraping event data from sites like Facebook/ Meetup/ etc
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