Inspiration
Litter in beaches, parks, and our own streets not only harms the environment, but can also cause severe accidents in our communities. Every year, 25,000 accidents are caused in USA by litter, 1 million seabirds are killed by litter every year, and 100,000 turtles and marine mammals die because of litter. To increase the safety of our streets, we also decided to focus on senior and non-able-bodied citizens, who may find it difficult to complete activities like shoveling snow and raking leaves. We created a crowdsourcing platform that addresses these issues by increasing awareness of the environment and providing opportunities for people to contribute back to their communities in a meaningful way.
What it does
Our app Open Streets allows users to post issues they notice in their surrounding locations, share details about the assistance that may be required, and automatically update the addresses and dates of when the posts were made. These posts are crowdsourced, allowing users to interact together and create a cleaner, collaborative, and connected community.
How I built it
HTML, CSS, Javascript/jQuery front-end. We used the Node.js environment, Leaflet.js for the map, Nominatim for reverse geo-encoding (converting latitude, longitude points into addresses), and MongoDB / Mongoose for database storage.
Challenges I ran into
We tried creating a feature to allow the user to submit pictures, but because we ran out of time, we weren't able to implement it.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We worked well together and were able to build a crowdsourcing tool, which we've never done before.
What I learned
We learned about reverse geo-encoding and how to build modals in EJS.
What's next for Open Streets
Since most of us bring our phones with us everywhere, we'd like to create an app version of Open Streets and allow the user to take photos.
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