IdeaCrowd

Do you ever have an idea for a project brewing in your head, but you're not sure where to start? IdeaCrowd enables you to jumpstart your project by connecting and exploring other projects

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Inspiration

Ever have an idea for a project brewing in your head, but you're not sure where to start? Our vision for IdeaCrowd is to allow you to jumpstart your project by connecting you with others with shared interests and similar project ideas! You can explore through a collection of current and previous projects for inspiration, and connect with other creators with ease.

What it does

My Profile

IdeaCrowd is a three step process to jumpstart your project idea.

  1. Find your narrative: You fill in a prompt with as many words as you can to describe your project in the Ideation Box, which uses Open AI's GPT-3 to distill the essence of your idea into relevant keywords for our matching algorithm.. From here, you complete your profile to describe your skillset, interests, and accomplishments to help match you with other creators.

  2. Draw inspiration_: After the initial prompt, you can explore past and current projects by creators of similar interests, and connect with them through IdeaCrowd to draw some inspiration and develop your idea.

  3. Check these out: IdeaCrowd will get you started with product management tools, and a shared workspace that lets you focus on your project, and connecting with other creators and potential collaborators.

Explore!

  • Featured: Our curated list of projects that are relevant to current/ recent events, social cause, eco-conscious, mental health awareness
  • Trending: A list of the projects that are hot, most viewed or most "favorite"
  • Inspire: A list of projects based on the user's selection of categories, and projects that are similar to the user's own project (if applicable)
  • User can click on the project and view it (if it is public), "favorite" it, and contact the project owner to see if there's a collaboration opportunity (this is where the Friends and Chat functionality would come in handy)

New Project

  1. Ideation Box: Freely write and describe your idea: what you want to do, what you intend to accomplish, who is the target audience, is this a private or collaborative project
  2. Tags: Select a few categories that might fit with your project
  3. Check these out: Based on the selected tags, and keywords processed from the Ideation Box by openAI, a short list of current and past projects that are similar to the new Project

Project Workspace

This page allows you to initiate your project. Basic tools will be provided to help guide you through the process of implementing the project, such as Budget Calculator, ToDo list, Calendar, Notebook, Sketchpad, Text Editor etc.

How we built it

Backend

We used Python, CockroachDB, Firebase, Docker

Frontend

We used React, HTML/CSS

Challenges we ran into

  • Connecting frontend and backend was a huge hurdle
  • Creating a Docker image for the Flask application because we chose to use CockroachDB which uses some PostgreSQL driver and it did some funky stuff (We will have spend the rest of the weekend deleting those "failed" images. Grrrrrrrr, I'm more familiar with MongoDB).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Submitting something (better than nothing haha)
  • We actually have a working Docker image of the Flask app (CockroachDB T-Shirt here I come)
  • We have some decent UI (although we had hope that it would look more like the ones we have on Figma).
  • The Flask app is a 400-line file (what a weekend)
  • We have a working sidebar

What we learned

  • Dev Ops and deploying applications ARE NOT TRIVIAL TASKS
  • Time is very limited
  • Balancing ambition and simplicity
  • Many, many, many new software

What's next for IdeaCrowd

Implementing the rest of the tools we had planned for

  • OpenAI: Keywords for the Ideation Box
  • Creating the Explore page
  • Creating the Project Workspace Page
  • Proper Sign-in Authentication
  • Connecting the pages together #### Commercial Potential
  • The basic project initiation, browsing for inspiration, networking/ chat are free and accessible to the public
  • Subscription Plan: IdeaCrowd Pro will provide more advanced tools to help develop your project
  • Promotional: Project Development tools can be advertised (eg Asana)

#Social cause #WebApp #CockroachDB #GoogleCloud #Mental Health #Ideation #Creativity #Ambitious

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