Inspiration
Ohio Safe Businesses was inspired by the lack of a tool for people to find information on how well businesses are keeping their customers safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
What it does
Uses COVID-19 business guidelines provided by the Ohio Department of Health to allow users to provide reports how well businesses are following current COVID-19 regulations through a web interface, as well as view reports on businesses in the user's area. The creation of reports requires a user account which the user can create though the web interface, but the scores for local businesses can be seen by anyone from the google maps pane on the home page.
How we built it
The site is built on a flask backend with a postgresql server hosted on one of the team members' machines. The front end is built using bootstrap along with the Google Maps Location API, with some help from the templating engine provided by flask. Version control was handled through GitHub throughout the development process.
Challenges we ran into
Flask was new to most of the team members, so getting that up and running smoothly was difficult at first. Along with this, Bootstrap was not cooperating (as usual,) so working through this was also a challenge. Another large problem is the location services API not being usable over HTTP. Because our host does not currently have an SSL certificate, the location of the user is not available unless the user is on the host machine. This will be fixed in the future, but time constraints prevented the team from solving this issue before submission. Aside from these, general server issues and merge conflicts were also present throughout the development process.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Users can (aside from the location service issue) utilize all features of the application, including submitting reports and viewing the scores of businesses that have had reports generated.
What we learned
The Google Maps API turned out to be a much more friendly tool than was initially expected, and happened to be very powerful for locating nearby businesses and allowing the user to search by keyword. We also learned that dynamic pages created using flask are significantly nicer to work with than static pages with javascript.
What's next for Ohio Safe Businesses
The next step for Ohio Safe Businesses is to increase the breadth of the project to include more regions' regulations, and to make the platform more secure against manipulation through bots or other means. After this, adding features to show statistics on locations in an area in a map overlay rather than on a business-by-business basis would be focused on.
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