Innopact

Inspire. Innovate. Impact.

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Inspiration

Tech solutions are mostly tackling the grand challenges faced by the majority of the population, challenges faced by underrepresented populations are often neglected and receiving less attention.

On the other hand, there are groups of passionate hackers who would like to work on projects to advance their skillsets and build up their portfolios.

Here is where Innopact comes in. Innopact collects all pain points, stories, challenges, and problems faced by underrepresented populations and normal humans like you and me, and presents them in categories for hackers to solve. Hackers can post their "challenges" with a brief description and who they are looking for, and gain points by creating and submitting a project to that challenge. Those gain points can later be used for exchanging free online courses on the platform.

Ideally, this will help solve problems/ challenges with no existing solutions, help hackers to learn new skills and build up their portfolios, facilitate cross-country and interdisciplinary collaboration, and make the world a better place.

What it does

The platform allows users to describe their problems, upload media (photos/ audio/ video), and react to other's pain.

Hackers can browse different problems and take up the challenge. By taking up the challenge, hackers can contact the author for more details and conduct interviews. Hackers can also see what other hackers have done in the past and why they failed so they are not wasting their effort on the same approaches.

For hackers not having an idea, they can browse projects and filter by project type (web app, mobile, embedded system, etc) and by skills/ languages/ expertises. Hackers can form teams and recruit members with the same learning goals, and they are encouraged to post regular updates on tackling the challenge. They can receive points by submitting a project and endorsement from their team members or challenge creator.

Demo

Try it out: https://innopact.ml Watch a video: https://youtu.be/YdKanaX10IQ

How we built it

UI design

The web app was designed using Figma

Front-end development

Our developers coded the UI using React, Next.js, TypeScript, and Chakra UI.

Back-end development

The backend was built using TypeScript, GraphQL, Postgres, and Redis

Challenges we ran into

We are an international team involving 4 different timezones, working internships, and attending school so not all of us were able to work on the project at the same time. We overcame this by effective communication and planning in discord.

Not all of us were familiar with the particular stack we decided on prior to the hackathon, but were all able to pick them up fairly quickly after watching a few tutorials.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a functional prototype!

What we learned

Not all of us have experience in typescript, next.js, chakra-ui or comfortable with react. We have stretched ourselves to dig into new frameworks and languages, and this was a fruitful learning process.

What's next for Innopact

New Features

Points system

Endorsement and recommendation system

Chat function

Team invitation & communication

Monthly spotlights

Built With

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