Matter

The modern world is plagued by material and resource wastage. Our product seeks to counter this by enabling communities to share resources that would otherwise be wasted, like food, clothes, and gas.

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Inspiration

The modern world faces a materials and resource crisis. As per The Guardian, about one pound of food is wasted per person. Our global gas supply steadily continues shrinking as more carbon emissions are send into our atmosphere. There are countless clothes that people store in their closets that they can no longer wear that could be donated others. We sought to target these specific crises by making an app that can allow communities to share these resources and interact with each other.

What it does

Matter is a social network platform that allows individual to see and make posts with user and friends within a certain radius. Users can make posts letting others in their community know that they have leftover food that they are willing to share, have clothes that they are willing to give away, or are going somewhere and willing to give someone a ride. Others can respond on these posts to let them know that they are coming. These interactions are incentivized by points that can be used for redeeming gift cards. Not only does this help improve sustainability, but also makes communities more tight knit by promoting people to get to know their local community.

How we built it

We built Matter using React Native with the Expo API to construct the front end of our app prototype, which is primarily coded in JavaScript. Our back end was developed using Google Firebase.

Challenges we ran into

The first few challenges we faced were during our brainstorming phase and coming up the ideas that fell within the scope of the competition and within the resources that we have been given access to. It took a longer time than we expected to come up with and begin development of an idea that could make use of what we had access to.

The other side of our challenges were more technical. Working with the Expo API and React Native was relatively new and, as a result, we had a bit of an issue when it came with debugging and one of the older libraries was outdated and not running properly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the idea that we came up with, as we believe it is a great way to improve connectivity within a community while also building a better and more sustainable, local environment.

From a more technical standpoint, we are proud of learning all that we have, from learning as much React and Java Script we could to being able to actually develop an app.

What we learned

As aforementioned, we learned a lot of new skills, especially in React, Java Script, and general app development. We have also learned about the process of developing a product and what has to go into that process. From a business standpoint, we learned about judging the marketability of ideas that we come up with.

What's next for Matter

Our next step with Matter would be expanding the categories it has, such as for gardening or volunteer events, or partnering with non-profit organizations in order to boost the presence of the app. We would also focus on further developing our UI to accommodate for these new changes and further improve it for our users.

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