Poke

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  Product Screenshots of Working Application

Inspiration...

Mike had the idea to create Poke when, as the Founders UIUC President, was frustrated that members weren't sharing posts about Founders events and opportunities online. On Slack and in meetings, he and the Executive Board would ask Founders members to share posts on social media to promote Forge, 54, and other events that Founders was organizing, but we always fell short of our community engagement goals. We realized that we could build a platform that made it easy for anyone in Founders to spread the word about our events. Later, it dawned on all of us that Poke was a project that all student organizations could use, and even beyond that— small and passionate organizations across the world. As Founders is a charity, we though Poke would be best suited as an open-source platform to fulfill our duty of transparency (as it befits a public service organization).

The Idea

Poke is, at its heart, an intermediate social-media sharing service. Organizations invite users to join to view organization-specific "Pokes" on the Poke app. Each Poke is a request to share a specific event or message on social media. Using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram credentials, users can click a button and be redirected to a social media platform with content pre-filled, making it extremely easy to promote organization events. After the user has posted, this poke is verified by a script that scrapes the social media platform for the recent post.

To incentivize sharing posts, an internal points system is provided and is unique to each organization. Users accrue points for sharing posts, and in return, they can redeem these points for rewards (which are also org-specific). These rewards could be a water bottle, a t-shirt, or a pizza party! It's entirely up to the organization to decide how to incentivize users, which makes the Poke platform much more flexible.

The Stack

This is a React web application that consumes several Google Cloud Functions, all of which access and modify a no-SQL database on Google's Firestore. The Firestore contains models and collections of Users, Rewards, Pokes, and Organizations. The Cloud Functions are all written in Python using the Firestore package to query and alter entries.

The Product

Our product layout contains three main tabs for users: Pokes, Rewards, and Profile. Users can see their current Pokes in the queue, and also look at what rewards they're eligible for. The Pokes page will update with new pokes when an organization creates a new poke, and likewise for rewards. You're able to view your current number of points on your Rewards tab and your Profile, where you can edit user settings.

Built With

• gcp
• google-cloud
• javascript
• python
• react
• redux
• webkit