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Inspiration
We see in many places that people are in fear of the novel coronavirus. They started hoarding massive amount of food and grocery, which left nothing for others. Some reacted the same way in response and worsen the situation. The fear of being left out and being isolated is causing people to act in an extreme way.
This can be stopped if only they were more informed. For example, if they knew there were sufficient stock level and be informed where to get them they wouldn’t need to be anxious about it. In other words, we need a method to disseminate up-to-date minute information to the community and allow them to make better judgement of the situation. This should be a joint effort from the entire community, not just one person.
Thats why I think an open collaborative platform would help. Showing information on a map would help users identify relevant information quickly to avoid building up crowds unnecessarily in this special situation which may lead to further spreading of the virus.
What it does
The app is designed to help people share real-time information on a map about grocery market stock level, road restrictions, shops hours reserved for senior citizens, neighborly help requests and resource sharing offers when people who are sheltering in place. This would help quicken information dissemination and reduce anxiety when people are sheltering in place. Users can put a note on a place in the map to broadcast real-time information relevant to the topics listed above. It is an open collaborative platform, similar to wikipedia, meaning any user can update or change the content of any note. The notes are time sensitive, out of date information will gradually disappear from the map.
How I built it
The mobile app is built using react native with expo, this makes it available on both iOS and Android. I built everything myself, the major frontend component is the map. I am using the google map API to get search result of places. The backend is firebase (cloud), where authentication and the database is served.
Challenges I ran into
This platform relies on collaborative input from many people to keep its information up to date. I need a better promotion / marketing channel to reach to more people in order to provide the most reliable information to the community.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I worked overnights consecutively for 3 days and finished a first version of the app from scratch. Then I told my neighbors and friends in the Bay Area about this app and I've received lot of support and positive feedback from the app. I have a small group of users constantly visiting the app in the past few days.
What I learned
I learned that people would act irrationally if they are not given enough information. Our society can be benefited by looking at how ants and bees work, where they collaboratively disseminate information to their colonies and strive for a common goal. We as a society need to work together in this special time to fight against the pandemic.
What's next for Open Mapnote
I am continuously improving the frontend and applying some deep learning techniques to simplify the process of entering real-time information for specific use cases, such as speech to text capability.
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