Inspiration
I fondly remember when my parents would have 50 Chrome tabs open during their housing searches. They'd have to juggle different sites relating to education, housing costs, transportation, etc. There was no one place that encapsulated the core data and provided a much more enjoyable user experience. We drew inspiration from the civic hacking effort. After being exposed to the various public data sets maintained by Philadelphia, we saw a need to consolidate it so that users can get a wholesome picture of the neighborhoods and streamline their housing searches.
What it does
We embraced the fact individuals have different wants and needs when it comes to housing. The webapp records the user's preferences and priorities in topics like recreation, healthcare, etc. If the user has young kids and values education, they can weight it higher than other topics. Conversely, if public transportation is not very important, they can reduce the weight. Our webapp then accesses our Azure NoSQL database of publicly available data from Philly (courtesy of opendataphilly.org) and provides a customized ranking of zipcodes overlayed on a map of Philly.
How I built it
We fed public Philly data from opendataphilly.org's datasets into a Microsoft Azure NoSQL database, ultimately having access to data sorted by zip code. We developed a Python/Flask based HTML/CSS/JS website that takes user preferences and displays a resulting map of favorable zip codes. We interfaced with Azure for our databasing and webapp hosting needs.
Challenges I ran into
There were inconsistencies within the formatting of public data from Philly, leading to challenges in parsing and storing it. Additionally, working with Azure databases using Python took some time to figure out. This was also our first large hack with a web-based front-end, so learning to use Flask and web dev frameworks was a huge and exciting challenge. We also got to use Google Maps APIs to process latitude/longitude data as well as embed an interactive map within our website.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We love the idea of socially impactful civic hacking as a way to improve people's lives, and we are proud that our hack can have such an effect. We also overcame numerous technical hurdles in the process, including exploring web development for the first time.
What I learned
Web dev is hard! Azure is also hard! Everything is hard. But not impossible ;)
What's next for Philly Home Finder
We want to be able to tap into more public resources to expand the reach of our hack. In the short term, we can look into encompassing more Philadelphia-related data as well as expanding it to the state of Pennsylvannia. Over the long term, we hope to close the accessibility gap between people and data so that people can make better informed decisions.
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