Relecon

Make an instant contribution to what matters today

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Inspiration

Our team is composed by international and heterogeneous profiles. I (Arthur) am coming from the public sector of international development, and surrounded myself with developpers and hackers, a field I had no expertise in, and tried to connect the two. Some of our team members lived in Puerto Rico, recently affected by Hurricane Hirma. This event was all over the news, making us eager to take actions. However, we had problems finding the best way to help.

Relecon was born when realizing that, as of today, there is no unified, global and free of access NGOs directory. We wanted to make information easily available for people interested in ongoing crisis and emergencies. Related to this, Relecon was also thought to educate users by giving more visibility to local development entities instead of always reaching out to the biggest NGOs. We wanted to enable people to find organisations that are relevant, locally-based and specifically tailored to the cause you hear and read about.

What it does

Relecon analyses the text of the news article you are reading. It picks out keywords from the article and matches them with our database. This process finds the three most suitable NGOs to the event the article covers. The organisations are displayed in a pop-up with a short description and the option of directly contributing to their cause.

How we built it

We started by manually searching and gathering data from numerous NGOs including their locations, activities and urls. Then, we scrapped texts from a sample of news articles from The Guardian and The New York Times to identify keywords and group them in themes. We finally matched the two data sets.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we faced was selecting NGOs manually and categorizing them in a way that is fair, and best suits the relevant articles.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the seamless and intuitive design of our extension. We also take pride in giving people the opportunity to take actions and, in fine, potentially make a good impact on various emergency situations.

What we learned

We learn to develop a chrome extension, somehting we were not familiar with before.

What's next for Relecon

Continuously improve and expand the database of organisations available, as well as raffine the matching between NGOs and news articles by expanding and deepening the pool of keywords used in the analysis.

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