General Track/ Best Hack for Social Good
Inspiration
Volunteer work is some of the most important work that is done in America today and allows less fortunate people to get the help they need even when they don't have money. However, all the current platforms for connecting Organizations and Volunteers are all based in Web 1.0, which is not garnering the attention of younger volunteers as much as they could. That’s why we wanted to build PassItOn (Nicknamed Pass). We wanted to increase community engagement in the younger generations and continue the timeless service of helping those less fortunate.
What it does
Pass allows organizers to post events that they need volunteers to help facilitate. This could be anything from a church advertising to volunteers for a feeding the homeless event to Doctors without Borders advertising to Doctors in order to gain enough participants to travel to another country to help provide healthcare to people in developing nations. It allows volunteers to accept 1 opportunity at a time in order to reduce over-promising and ensure everyone who signs up, shows up.
How we built it
We Made Pass' front-end with HTML5, CSS3, and vanilla Javascript which was mostly done by our amazing front-end devs Yu Tung and Liang Yu. The data storage and routing used to store events and user’s information made with Express.JS and mostly done by Daniel and Malachi.
Challenges we ran into
We initially wanted to be able to store a lot more information about events as well as have our users be able to reserve their spots in as many events as they wanted. Due to challenges connecting to our Azure database with Express.JS, we had to pivot to locally hosted storage which caused us to limit each volunteer to one event at a time, however we were able to save much of the data storage capabilities we originally wanted.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of our front end and how it ended up looking. We're also proud that despite the fact we had to scrap our original server entirely, we were still able to create a front-end and back-end. Finally we're proud that despite this being almost everyone's first hackathon we stuck with a project we believed in and delivered in only 24 hours.
What we learned
After scrapping our Azure database Daniel and Malachi had to learn new technologies almost completely from scratch in order to salvage the functionality of our project. On the front-end, Yu Tung and Liang Yu have to collaborate with each other when merging the HTML files together due to the difference in coding habits. Making a good layout that makes users easy to read is also the thing we’ve learned from this event.
What's next for Pass
Next for Pass, we want to move our data storage into a remote hosted database to allow for many more events to be stored. We also want to incorporate more filters and search functions to allow events to become more discoverable. Finally, we want to make it easier for users to share their event page on different social media platforms to garner more support and volunteers as well as a potential donation function.
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