Lea | Devpost

Inspiration

Abuse is not only something explicit and violent, as we often imagine. It can also involve covert, manipulative tactics of slowly cutting off a person’s ties with their close ones, intentionally eroding the person’s financial independence under the guise of provision. Abusive partners grow more controlling over time, starting with seemingly-innocent prying questions, advancing to spying, phone tracking, and outright curfews. Authorities are often vastly ineffective and unwilling to solve such problems, and even complicit themselves. There is a lack of adequate shelter provision all over the world and women in dire situations cannot afford to wait for help.

What it does

Lea is a platform that enables women to find support and to provide safety nets to others, securely and privately. It pairs abuse victims with hosts who are willing to gratuitously provide them with a temporary shelter, a warm meal, babysitting for an hour or even a supportive talk over a cup of tea. We believe that enabling community-powered problem solving is the most effective way to achieve social change, and we facilitate it by providing safety, security and privacy. Hosts’ identities are carefully verified; communications are end-to-end encrypted; users can even bypass their abusers’ tracking by elaborately spoofing their physical locations and arrange secret, untraceable meetups.

How we built it

Lea is built primarily as a web-app, with the prototype’s front-end written in React.js. With its unique ability for secure location spoofing, it makes heavy use of various geolocation APIs: Google Maps, Reverse Geocoding, Directions, Address Search, and HTML5 Geolocation APIs. We made an effort in ensuring a smooth, fast, and, most importantly, calming and encouraging UX, with a UI designed in Figma.

Challenges we ran into

Working with Google Maps API was slightly challenging for us since it was the first time we were applying it to any of our projects but we got a hang of it and successfully completed the work which is the most important outcome

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Most and foremost, we are proud of creating a safe space for abused women who are in need of a temporary shelter.

What we learned

Every hackathon is a challenge and HackViolet was not an exception. During the past 24 hours, our team enhanced its collaboration and cooperation skills, as well as time management, presentation, software design and video-editing abilities that are considered as an integral part of any hackathon.