ShelterShare

Inspiration

When our team discussed what we do during a severe storm, we realized that we all either have family/friends come over, or we go over to someone else's house. Then we thought about those who live in areas prone to major storms, but do not have anyone they know nearby that they can go to in the event of their house being severely damaged by it. According to the "Scientific American", disasters such as hurricanes and floods displaced 46 million people in 2024. Our website plans to address this major issue.

What it does

How our website works is, if you are in an area unaffected by a nearby hurricane/severe storm, you can list your house up to host those who have been displaced by the storm. As a host, you will need to provide: full name, email address or phone number, zip code to be located by displaced persons, how many people you can host, beds available, and how long you can host those in need (in weeks). As someone seeking shelter, you will need to provide a full name, email address or phone number, zip code, number of people in your household, beds needed, an estimated length of stay in weeks, and if you have pets or not. Both parties will also need to submit identification to be held accountable if they are malicious in any way towards one another. After submitting the form as someone seeking shelter, you will be matched with someone who can house you as soon as possible, and receive their information through email or text (depending on if you input your email address or phone number).

How we built it

Once we came up with our ideas, we decided to divide the work into creating the backend that matched families in need with potential homes, creating the frontend pages for the landing page, those providing housing, receiving housing, and integrating a verification system. We utilized AI tools throughout to work more efficiently and automate repetitive tasks. We decided to store each form submission into the browser’s local storage as a structured JSON object (since this is a ‘demo’) and from there the matching.js file would determine the compatibility of each giver and seeker, and pair two together if they were compatible and they were the closest to each other geographically.

Challenges we ran into

Wrangling CSS in order to make the project’s logo stay within its intended bounds. There were also difficulties in learning the APIs used and how to implement them effectively. Since we all worked on separate parts, we ran into an issue of names not matching up for Givers/Hosts, but added aliases so that both titles could be used.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Effectively integrating the Persona API into the verification page, as well as the Geoapify API for calculating the distance between the seeker and giver. We’re also proud of showing the matched pairs on the homepage of the website and showing who’s available & waiting to match.

What we learned

How to coordinate as a team, as each person was delegated a role and we had to check in with each other in order to bridge the gaps between each of our sections of the project and unify the website’s systems. We also learned how to use third-party APIs as we used Persona for ID verification and Geoapify to calculate the distance between two locations.

What's next for ShelterShare

We designed this project within the constraints of the 12 hour time limit, however given more time, there are many aspects we would like to expand. First, we would like to move storage from this project from locally to a real database like Supabase. We would also like to expand the security aspects by adding methods for hosts or families to cancel and report a bad match in the app. Content moderation for any open ended fields such as additional needs should be used as well.