Shelter Me

Inspiration

Many homeless people now have cell phones, but they may not have a smart phone or constant access to the internet. How do we provide them with a way to find the resources available to them without requiring an internet connection?

What it does

Provides information about the nearest help location based on commands sent via sms. Commands are simple, single word messages relating to the service provided. Commands include: "list" to show all commands, "shelter" to identify the nearest shelter and/or food bank, "safe" to identify the nearest Women's shelter, "support" provides a list of 24/7 support hotlines, and "emergency" for the nearest free health clinic.

How we built it

The Back end is built with Ruby, Twilio, PostgreSQL, Heroku, and Sinatra The Front end is built with HTML, CSS, and Javascript

Challenges we ran into

We are a team of beginners, and have extremely limited experience in building both front end and back end. We had to learn several new API's in a very limited amount of time. Also, the trial version of twilio requires phone numbers to be authorized, so we only have a proof of concept.