I came to the hackathon without any ideas for it, no idea what I wanted to do; I just thought I'd see what some of the sponsors briefs where and go from there!
The only brief that jumped out was the 'something for a victim of crime' from the Ministry of Justice. I felt that as a victim of crime myself (who isn't unfortunately) that I could build something from a perspective that might be helpful.
My first idea was to build something that would automatically spam someone based on their name/address - this would have been aimed at the guy who hit me last summer. But then again, that'd probably be frowned upon by the MOJ, so maybe not.
My second idea, and the one I ran with, was more to help with the aftermath of being broken into - another crime I have unfortunately been victim too. This is not a 'support centre' or 'help group' for victims of crime, but more of a practical endeavour. Though, in hindsight I realise that the MOJ would probably want something a little more 'judicial' based.
This is a web app to help victims track down their stolen goods.
Upon signing up, you can add an incident to your account, with a title, where it happened, the date of the incident and an (optional) police number. And then from there you can add items that have been stolen. - When adding these items, you add a name, and a few keywords.
The user can then action the site to check eBay to look for all of the items they have added. The logic then interprets the results into a useful manor. It takes all of the usernames of all of the items returned. Counts and ranks them, and outputs the results. Basically leaving you with the most likely suspect for the robbery. I.e. someone who is selling (or 'fencing') a lot of items that match the items that the user has had stolen.
I used distance and date filters to try and get the most accurate results.
Unfortunately the targeted user for this, is someone who has been victim of robbery. Hence the tagline 'A site you never want to use', in an ideal world, a site like this would never have to exist.
Technical notes: Built in PHP(LEMP), based on my custom built rapid development framework (Henry) - I can provide a code base if you need (it's on my bitbucket). Using the eBay public search API Also used: TWIG, jqueryUI, SASS Code is hosted locally
Flaws: Popular items have a massively large amount of results, and so it's slow, and not ideal. Some sellers sell multiples of the same items, that gives you false positives. It relies on robbers being intelligent (or stupid) enough to use eBay.
2.0 Hypothetical API's such as gumtree, cash converters etc. would be ideal for improvement. Crons to run the search on a regular basis, thus allowing the user to leave the site and still get updates Adding images to your items Maybe work with more people (rather than just by myself) to achieve more in small amount of time?
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