HomeCrowd

Inspiration

The FIFA World Cup brings millions of people together through a shared love of sport, but in Vancouver many of the best celebrations aren't easy to find.

As we explored the city during the tournament, we noticed that information about watch parties, cultural festivals, food events, and community gatherings was scattered across Instagram, Reddit, community groups, and word of mouth. While official FIFA resources highlighted major events, much of Vancouver's local culture remained hidden.

We wanted to build a platform that helps visitors experience the real Vancouver while helping locals, businesses, and cultural communities become part of the World Cup experience.

That's how HomeCrowd was born.

What it does

HomeCrowd is a social event discovery platform designed specifically for FIFA World Cup Vancouver.

Users can discover events happening across the city, explore neighbourhoods based on culture and community, join group chats, share updates from celebrations, and connect with other fans. Businesses and community organizers can also promote events and experiences to visitors looking for authentic local recommendations.

Rather than focusing solely on events, HomeCrowd focuses on helping people find their crowd.

How we built it

We began by researching how FIFA-related events are currently discovered in Vancouver and quickly found that information is fragmented across multiple platforms.

To address this, we used Apify to scrape FIFA-related events, community gatherings, watch parties, and local cultural experiences. We analyzed cultural neighbourhood patterns using ethnic restaurant and location data, designed the user experience in Figma, and developed the prototype using AI-assisted development tools.

The result is a platform that combines event discovery, neighbourhood exploration, social networking, community feeds, and messaging into a single experience.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was differentiating HomeCrowd from existing event platforms.

Early concepts felt similar to Meetup or traditional event directories. Through iteration, we realized that the real opportunity was not helping people find events, but helping people find communities.

We also faced challenges representing Vancouver's cultural diversity in a way that felt authentic while creating meaningful recommendations for visitors exploring the city.

Accomplishments that we're proud of Creating a concept that extends beyond the World Cup and can support future festivals and city-wide events. Designing a platform that benefits visitors, local businesses, and community organizations simultaneously. Building a user experience focused on long-term connections rather than one-time event attendance. Showcasing Vancouver's multicultural identity through neighbourhood-based discovery. What we learned

This project showed us how difficult it can be to discover local experiences, even during a global event as large as the FIFA World Cup.

We learned about event aggregation, geospatial data visualization, community-driven product design, rapid prototyping, and how technology can strengthen cultural connections within cities.

Most importantly, we learned that people are often looking for community as much as they are looking for events.

What's next for HomeCrowd

Future versions of HomeCrowd could include:

Real-time event aggregation from social media AI-powered event recommendations Creator and business onboarding tools Multilingual support for international visitors Partnerships with local community organizations Expansion to future festivals and major city events

Our vision is simple:

Turn FIFA visitors into community members and help Vancouver's diverse neighbourhoods become part of the World Cup experience.