OutThere

A platform for advertising small events, street performances, pop-up shops, food gatherings, etc. The aim of this app is to bring people together to get out and appreciate the often-overlooked arts.

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Inspiration

This project was inspired by the theme of the Hackathon, "Community." Our first thought was, what aspects of the city of Chicago are overlooked more often than not? The first thing that came to mind was the small performer, the people out on the sidewalks playing music, hosting gatherings, creating spectacles with their art. They are always there, but there's no way to truly seek them out, to find them and give them the support and appreciation their work deserves. Hence, OutThere, a platform for the independent artist, small band, street musician.

What it does

In its current state, this application allows the user to post an event with a location and filter tag attached. It will also allow them to see the list of created events, as well as filter them by the provided tags. There is also a settings menu, with several options that we would like to implement given some more time, like notification pings for certain types of events and a radius that you would like to see events in.

How we built it

Using JavaFX and SceneBuilder, we were able to create a functional UI which uses different elements of itself to add and filter through a list of events. The three of us collaborated via GitHub.

Challenges we ran into

There were quite a few rough spots, the largest of which was just getting started. We had some really frustrating patches where two of us could compile but one couldn't, as well as a very large roadblock which stalled us for an hour or two when attempting a certain approach with initializing the project to include some prebuilt events.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud first and foremost of the idea, we think that the impact this could have on the individuals who survive off the money they make providing entertainment for passersby could be huge. Additionally, working around the roadblocks filled us with determination to create new, inventive approaches to the ideas we were struggling with. Specifically the filtering system went through several iterations and ended up in a state that we're really happy with.

What we learned

It's hard to work in a language that you haven't taken a class on in a while! While JavaFX definitely let us produce a more impressive result than we would have gotten elsewhere, it took a lot to get back into the swing of things with Java. We also learned that there's merit to switching up your approach when an obstacle has gotten in the way for too long. We spent a bit too much time dwelling on how awful one approach or another was, and finally, when we stopped to breathe and brainstorm new ideas, we got somewhere with things.

What's next for OutThere

We would love to continue working on this application, to make it a true social network, to allow multiple users to add and attend posted events at once over a server network (which we actually got a head start on). Additionally, integrating with Google Maps would be really neat and something we'd want to try.

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