See Your Data - Waltham Chamber of Commerce

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from the famous phrase, "Information does not take you far, but knowledge does." The website of the Waltham Chamber of Commerce currently displays information, but there is nothing further that can be deduced from it. We have driven our project into something that not only displays the information (raw data) that our customers type in but converts it into useful knowledge that can be used to identify strengths and shortcomings within the business and help it propel forward.

What it does

Our project is a web app that focuses specifically on events that the Waltham Chamber of Commerce hosts. All attendees of the event are encouraged to fill out a Google form and answer a few questions related to their business, their membership status, their satisfaction with the Waltham Chamber of Commerce, and more. All of this information is stored on a spreadsheet, which is where our data management begins. Our web app allows the user, who could be an employee or volunteer of the Waltham Chamber of Commerce, to upload a spreadsheet and then obtain visualizations (bar charts or pie charts) of the data within. These visualizations help decision-makers identify trends that may be of great use to the business. Moving forward, we will also incorporate Machine Learning into the solution, as we want our information to be converted into a tool of great mobility.

How we built it

As a team of 6, we split up tasks amongst one another. We utilized team expertise within front-end and back-end domains and made sure that everyone worked together and had the same end goal in mind. We used multiple libraries from Python, as well as HTML, to get to the end product. We focused on functionality and form at the same time, as we knew that both of these would be necessary for a business-ready solution.

Challenges we ran into

We worked with some tools and libraries that we had no prior expertise with. This was initially challenging, as we would run into minor errors throughout the development phase. We combatted this by searching for tutorials and carefully calibrating our code and design to match high-quality code. This was a positive challenge to have, as everyone learned something new from it.

Another challenge was the lack of data to be processed. We had no data from the Waltham Chamber of Commerce and had to generate random data during multiple phases of our project, as our project depended entirely on pure, cleaned data. Finding ways to overcome such challenges was intellectually fun.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we reached our end goal, which was to find a way to bring information to life and give it true meaning through colorful visualizations that educate the user every time they press the "Generate Visualization" button.

We are proud of the fact that everyone stuck together as a team and carried out tasks efficiently, even if it meant that they had to learn something new or do something challenging and time-consuming.

What we learned

We learned that brainstorming and setting an end goal is really important within a development setting and that it should be done as quickly as possible when there is a time limit or a deadline around the project. Only after we had brainstormed properly and distributed tasks appropriately could we begin with the actual technical aspect of the project.

The entire team refined their skills across front-end and back-end domains, which will only benefit the team and the projects that they may set out to do in the future.

Finally, we learned that unity and teamwork are important when working on a large project. Alone, it would be very difficult to brainstorm and get different ideas and perspectives during each phase of the project. Being united propels everyone!