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Logo
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User flow
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Tech Stack
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UI/UX planning on Figma
Inspiration 💡
Making our way in downtown Toronto, it's so easy for us to see so many homeless people uncared for. It's a problem that is faced in nearly every major city. In Toronto alone, 8700 people face homeless each day. It brought us the question - what can we do as a community to help those who need it the most?
What it does ⚙️
Allows a kind-hearted person to:
- Find the closest homeless person around their area and what they need
- Choose how to help the homeless person (either by donating time, resources, or choosing to pre-pay grocery items at local businesses)
- Buy items and pay the fees associated with a local business
- Create a QR code for verification when homeless people pick up items within a radius
Allows a homeless person to:
- Put their needs for the community to see
- Generate QR codes for picking up items that have been pre-paid by the community
How we built it 🛠️
- Azure Power Platform with Power Apps to create a low code solution
- Bing Maps
- Dynamic xlsx database ingestion
- Microsoft Lists
Challenges we ran into 🚧
- Azure has so many complex functions that aren't accessible with student accounts, or locked by an admin group!
- Power Apps has limited functionality, and it isn't possible to share access outside of the school's organization which was linked to our Azure credit. We tried to make a submission using our personal account, but there was no workaround to this.
Accomplishments that we're proud of 🌟
- Learning to use Power Apps from scratch in a limited amount of time
- Working as a team despite it being the first time meeting
What we learned 📖
- How to use Power Apps
- Low-code is more challenging than coding it out on our own
What's next for Sharity 🚀
- Future partnership with organizations such as Second Harvest and Retailers in crowdsourcing near expiry goods for Toronto.
- Integrate with a payment gateway so we can pay directly to local businesses
- Offline features such as access to popular pickup locations for donations and public services such as libraries and parks.
- Requesting services for those who don’t have phones. This can involve providing Sharity information on the platform that a person is in need of assistance.
Please note that due to education accounts, we can't share the link to non-waterloo students! We wanted to upload the source code into GitHub but it says that it is still an experimental feature, and wasn't recommended.
