Inspiration
We learned that the majority of the homeless community owns mobile phones, and that inspired us to create a solution that leverages the technology they are already familiar with and have access to.
What it does
Our team built an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to help the homeless find available beds in the area on short notice. The IVR uses a phone tree to allow the client to enter information about themselves to better enable them to find shelter in accordance to their needs. The system also has the functionality to allow the client to make a reservation at a selected location.
How we built it
This application uses IVR to elicit information from an individual and find shelters that they qualify for in their area. The IVR was implemented using the Node.JS Twilio library. Availability of shelters is determined by a PostgresSQL backend made available through a simple Python API. This information is also presented on an availability dashboard which updates in real-time.
Challenges we ran into
We needed to have better architecture design and we did not have a good development balance. As a result of so much ideation we did not commit to a solution early enough to fully realize the potential of our product.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We survived! We worked very hard and came together to come up with a working demo that is very cool.
What we learned
Read the directions! Assume a perfect world with very basic constraints in order to brainstorm solutions and prototype more quickly...adapt to constraints later. You have to create a very appealing front-end for the purposes of the hackathon to impress. Go for the common benefit and do not focus too much on one person's wish list.
What's next for Hack to the Future
We would like to allow to use crowdsourcing for locating homeless and distressed individuals. For example, we would like to allow people to report locations where homeless might be found in a fashion similar to the Waze app. At that point, a representative from a shelter could then go to that location and meet with the individual. We would also like to go further with the analytics piece of our project. We would like to start sharing some of the data collected from our application and expand the types of questions that are being asked. We can then start sharing more information between agencies to allow for better tracking of services provided and different outcomes.
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