poverless

Inspiration

We want to do what we are best at (coding!) to solve a major world problem: poverty. We had CARE (international NGO) in mind when we started doing the app.

We do not usually donate to causes if we are at home, mainly due to the overwhelming number of causes in need and due to us not being fully aware of their need. We do not usually donate any significant amount to the people on the streets, since we do not know how that money will be spent, or possible due to cash being unavailable in our wallet.

However, if we had an app that could instantly donate money to a whole area and ensure the improvement of that area through a secure channel, we would most probably feel guilty when we see homeless people / ugly buildings/ etc and would make the donation. If it goes to an NGO, we can be reasonably sure that the money will be well spent ;)

What it does

The user opens the app and sees a map of his current position. He is then able to select an area and donate money to that specific area by just taking a picture of their card. The money then goes to an an NGO such as CARE.

This should be very effective if we are just passing a homeless area of a town and we want to improve that specific area. The NGO and the public can see a real time map of the donations at jupiter.eecs.jacobs-university.de/poverless

How I built it

The client is Android (java) integrated with Card.io, Google Maps and BrainTree (BrainTree still not working). We have a proxy which charges the credit card built using Node.js The frontend is built using HTML & CSS & Javascript & PHP integrated with Google Maps.

Challenges I ran into

Setting up the data pipeline (getting data from the phone to the frontend without using 3rd parties such as Parse) Integrating with BrainTree (due to port 80 being taken on the server) - still not really solved Updating data real-time on the front-end