Karalambana

we the helping hands

Comment

Inspiration

Karalambana, a sanskrit term which means 'Helping Hands'. During the past 1.5 years, we saw the different facets of the system collapse due to mismanagement and an unruly lockdown because of which people were not able to avail the basic necessities. We saw people scramble for food, money, medicines, doctors, and even oxygen. Karalambana aims at mitigating all such crises.

What it does

Karalambana is a platform to streamline all sorts of donations viz. food, money, medicines et al. while also serving as the go-to place for doctor appointments. It acts as a facilitator between donors and seekers so that the delay, congestion and shortage of the basic needs is always kept at bay.

How we built it

For the design prototype we used Figma so that we could visualize the concept. The webpage was entirely made in CSS, html, javascript, and bootstrap, since we found them pretty convenient to work with. For storing user details, doctors and medicine information, functionalities of MongoDB Atlas and SQL were used for developing the backend. The API call is done through Postman Novel Covid API to track covid-19 details. We are also using a geolocation API to get the graphical position of a users so that they can get the nearby facilities. All the user confidential information will be encrypted and stored in a vault, and not to be shared to a third party. We dont have any ad based model to generate revenue based on the user data.

Challenges we ran into

From a technological standpoint, envisioning the logo for the project, designing the webpage using figma was a bit challenging as we were using it for the first time and a few other knick-knacks in CSS proved to be small bumps in our road to the implementation of the project. Finding the correct database schemas required some brainstroming. Secondly, to bring our organization out in the world, get the hotels, doctors and drug stores onboarded has been a substancial task.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Coming up with our working prototype in the time crunch, learning implementation of api functions and front end parts in this short span was really taxing.

What we learned

Hackathons are stepping stones to learn something new even if we don't win it. We learnt how to solve a real-life problem in the present situation, and the complexity behind planning an appropriate website to meet people's needs. We all worked together on designing our Website on Figma, helped correct the flaws in each other's work. We found the need to support our community and learned how to rift the bridge between technology and humanity.

What's next for Karalambana

Our team plans to expand this prototype by including more features, expanding this idea from the hacker community to anyone interested in and believing in the spirit of collaboration and teamwork to help mankind. As rightly said 'the Human Self is the only friend and saviour to all Humanity'.

Share this project:

Updates