ECOmmunity

Connect with a local community of people empowering each other to live sustainably. Bulk buy groceries, earn points for your halls of residence and support your peers!

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Inspiration

As environmentally-conscious students, we would like to buy sustainable, locally produced fresh ingredients. However, there is usually a high-cost barrier if we buy for only one person. By buying in bulk with other members of our community (student halls, condo building or even street) we can help fight food waste, save money, live more sustainably and build a community of like-minded peers!

What it does

ECOmmunity provides a platform for local producers to sell their sustainably produced goods. Customers can buy as individuals but orders are linked with other orders in their local community so orders are processed in bulk, decreasing the final price, and shipped together so that the final mile carbon footprint is reduced. On checkout, the customer earns sustainability points for their order, depending on how much carbon was saved on their order. Other relevant features include sustainability points tracker and leaderboards to keep everyone motivated and willing to encourage other members of their community to shop more sustainably.

How we built it

We created prototype designs for all relevant pages in the webapp and created a database to store all information regarding merchants, products and users. As a demo, one of the pages ("/inventory") is connected to the database. We used an Express.js server with EJS to render files connected using PostgreSQL to an Heroku database. On the front-end, we used a bootstrap template and coded in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Challenges we ran into

Web development is new for most of the members of the team and it was a challenge to pick up and use loads of new concepts. We are also new to coding collaboratively using Git and ran into a few merge conflicts - but thankfully were able to solve them! Learning how to integrate JavaScript functions to dynamically update our page contents was also a challenge. Finally, linking the frontend to the database also raised challenges with the Heroku credentials and the security requirements.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of all the learning! It was amazing to see the team going from knowing nothing about web development to confidently creating new beautifully-looking pages, sharing their work using version control and adding clever logic under the hood. We purposely split tasks to help everyone learn something new, and used frameworks that were new for everybody. Those of us who already knew about front-end development worked mostly on the back-end and vice versa. We are very proud of how we supported each other throughout this journey!

What's next for ECOmmunity

We see this project growing into other aspects of sustainable living, including transportation and sharing of used clothes or objects. Our vision is to have a community-based platform where people can track their efforts towards a more sustainable lifestyle and support and encourage their communities in the process!

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