Project Oasis

We live in a world where individuals have greater access to Facebook than to fresh produce. We hope to help these low income "Food deserts" by connecting people to food distribution organizations.

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Inspiration

As fellow Terry Scholars here on campus. We participate in a lot of Community service. One issue that we have been doing a lot of volunteer work for lately was food insecurity. When we thought about what issues we could choose we immediately settled on this general topic. After some more research one member of my team came across Bonton Farms and food deserts in general and we were set.

What it does

Our project is multi-faceted not only for people to be able to learn about what a food desert is on our information page, but also to be able to connect organizations that might not have as much outreach potential to low income neighborhoods. These organizations would give us the times and dates that they are planning to travel to different areas and we could alert members of the community about these chances well in advance so that they could plan to attend ahead of time. Users can open up the web page and see a map of the nearest fresh food grocery stores or food banks based on their location. Users can sign in using google auth and receive reminders when there are special markets near them.

How we built it

The app is built using the MERN stack. MongoDB for backend, Express as a middleware, React for front end, and node as our package manager. Additionally it heavily uses 3 google api's including Authentication to store user data and end them events, Maps to display stores and nearby food banks, and Nearby Places API to retrieve what was close and available for our users. The data used for shapefiles was all processed in Python before being used.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a couple of problems over the course of the project. The primary problem we ran into was for one of our major features we wanted to implement. Originally on top of being able to show the closest locations to a user for fresh food we wanted a visual representation about just how prevalent this issue was not only in the world, but also across the US. We had all of the tools for the project. We aggregated census data from the federal government as well as food desert information from a non profit. Then using GIS or Geographical Information Systems we merged these shape files and formed an overlay for any map that had a mesh for each state showing how prevalent this issue was. Unfortunately we got stuck between making this shape file and goggle maps because the open-source software we were using couldn't output the data we needed in the correct format for it to be consumed by the google maps api. Another issue we ran into was connecting our routes together while using Google Auth. We had difficulty building out our app's routes without interfering in the Authentication API which had to be persistent throughout the whole app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of the sheer amount of work we managed to get done in our period. With 3 members total 2 of which being freshman it felt overwhelming trying to get all of the ideas in our brain out in code before us. But with all three of us supporting each other throughout the entire night we realized that the final product looks better than any of us could imagine it would have at the beginning. Additionally it was exciting to use so many of the google cloud API's since none of us had ever had the chance to work with them before.

What we learned

We learned a lot over the last 24 hours. Everything from styling in CSS, using prominent API's in our project, understanding the purpose of a proxy server when attempting to fetch data, the purpose of using branches in Github, and how vectorized polygons can be used to visually describe our world. Most importantly we had the opportunity to learn about an issue that affects over a 5th of the land area of our country, and learned how we can work towards a solution for that issue.

What's next for Project Oasis

The next task we want to accomplish is to migrate the shape files to a useable format for google maps. We all believe that a visual representation of just how close this issue is to our own communities is invaluable when we work together to come up with a solution. Additionally we would love to actually connect people to groups that can help them get the nutrition that can lead them long and happy lives.

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