My People

People have been displaced from their country, from Afghans to Africans who left their homes for greener pastures. To fix this problem of struggling to adapt to new environments, we created My people.

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Mission Statement:

Creating cultural communities.

Motivation:

This year alone, thousands of people have been displaced from their country. From Afghans to just Africans who left their homes for greener pastures. Most of these people end up in new countries alone and are unable to find people that look or think like them to help speed the adaptation process. It is a known fact that humans are social creatures, hence the need to socialize and eventually form cliques with similar beings. This need intensifies in situations when one seems to be the odd one out. To fix this problem of not belonging and struggling to adapt to new environments we create My people.

MY PEOPLE

How can you find your own when you are far from home especially due to shaky circumstances back in your nation? Simple, pull up My People and we got you. Simply creating and verifying your account gives you access to people with similar interests like you. You are able to follow and chat with the people you select. People can also offer or search for services. Most international students are unable to work off-campus and the current situation of several economies has left them unable to receive money from home in a timely manner. These students usually have several skills that they can monetize and My People is ready to link them up to customers within their social groups.

Tech Architecture

We used Node Js for the backend and React Js for the frontend when developing the app and then connected it to a MongoDB database. The framework used was Express.js

Challenges we ran into

Our goal was to make a mobile app that would be able to work with Android and ios. To do so, we took some time to learn flutter. We eventually ditched this after a few hours our fixing installation bugs across the teammates’ computers. Our team members had issues connecting to the internet so that put us behind by a couple of hours. When we finally decided to make a website, we lost access to the domain name so we could not get the free domain name.

New things learned

Our team members learned how to use Node and React for the first time. It was also our first time using Mongo DB for a database.

What’s next

Future Updates

We plan to improve the search engine to enable the use of tags. This way, we can increase the speed it takes to find things in a certain category. A major aspect we plan to work on would be a Services page. We plan to crawl through the posts made and identify when people post about needing or offering a service. This will then provide a space for people to perform transactions on the app without moving out of the app.

Revenue Generation

We believe the app can be self-sustaining by allowing Google ads on the website. Since the app will be a hotspot for international students, we will open a spot or page for universities to share their information and charges fees for it.

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