ProTracker

Protesting safely and efficiently!

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Inspiration

During these past few months, the Black Lives Matter movement was sparked when the death of many African American citizens under police brutality was brought to light. This movement inspired many people to go to the streets and protest for their rights. However, my team and I realized that the people protesting are risking their lives due to the still ongoing CoronaVirus. Thus, our project tries to target the problem that CoronaVirus has brought upon this movement.

What it does

I realized that in protests if too many people attended it, some protesters will turn to rioting and looting nearby stores. This is a result of mob mentality, where if a group of people do something then more and more people will follow in pursuit. Moreover, the more people who attend, the higher chance that they will pass the ongoing virus to each other. Hence, my team and I decided to create a website where people can post protests and then regulate the amount of people that go to it. People who post a protest can set a maximum amount of people and if the certain cap is reached, no one else will be able to see the protest or sign up for it, allowing the app to somewhat regulate the amount of people who see the information. By this mitigation, less people will show up to protests causing less riots and a safer environment for them to protest in. Having more frequent but smaller protests will have the same impact as few bigger protests but the smaller protests will also create a safer environment for the protesters.

How we built it

I built this web app using the LAMP stack, which is essentially running an apache server, having a mysql backend, php server side code, which are all run on linux. We also used leaflet and openstreetmaps for the map and geocoding. By incorporating php superglobals, we can create login and registration for users. For web design, we used HTML and CSS as the main base of our web dom.

Challenges I ran into

There were a couple of challenges that we ran into while creating the product. One problem that we had faced was that the Google Maps API wasn’t allowing use to create multiple markers in different locations. To solve this issue, we decided to change from Google Maps API to Leaflet. This was a good choice because Leaflet was easy to interact with and looks very professional. Other challenges we had was just starting the server and having everything fit together with it. We did not have as much experience with creating a LAMP stack or creating mysql backend but through this project, we were able to learn so much about how a website works.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The most important accomplishment that we’re proud of is that we were just beginners and we were able to create a nice organized website. We went out of our comfort zone and used tools that greatly impact us. We started with very little experience, but were able to grow and develop the website. We also were proud that we built a web application that can be used realistically in the world right now and alleviate societal issues.

What I learned

We learned how to use advanced features in PHP, HTML, and CSS, such as creating user registration and login or even just using mysql backend and its database. We were also able to learn how to use the Leaflet map and incorporate geocoding.

What's next for ProTracker

This project was started when we were pure beginners at LAMP stack development. However, after grasping a good feel about this project, we now can improve it through many different ways. For instance, we are thinking of creating a verification process which can then allow less spam and have more legit results for protests. We hope ProTracker can be later developed into a more full-fledged idea and used to improve people’s lives.

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