Inspiration
Problem: Inspired by the nearby wildfires in Napa valley, as well as other disasters currently happening around the world, we wanted to connect people affected by the disasters with those in their communities - especially their friends and family.
What it does
Solution: Haven offers an interactive, social way for the members of the community to input local disasters and how the incidences are affecting them so they can receive help.
How I built it
We started off by focusing on the users and brainstorming the different possible needs of people in and around disaster areas. We then decided to create both a mobile and desktop web app. The mobile app focused on the the victims of the disaster, allowing them to post what was happening and how they needed help. The web app would then notify community members about information happening in that disaster in real time. When implementing, we decided to use Esri’s ArcGIS API and Android SDK for location data and map data visualizations, which are both key to our applications.
Challenges I ran into
We tried using the beta version of ArcGIS Javascript API, but some features we needed were not yet fully supported because the beta is still a work in progress.
We were hosting our API on Heroku, but it went down around 4am, making it too unstable for connecting our application. This means our client apps and backend currently cannot communicate with one another.
Generally speaking, our idea was really complex with many different possible angles and use cases. It became difficult to scale down, and we ended up pivoting many times in less than 24 hours.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Even though Heroku went down, we are proud of building a functional API service connected to a PostgreSQL database. User centered design. We focused designing on user driven application flow for a victim to easily interact with in a high stress situation. We heavily referred to HCI guidelines and used HCI methodologies in designing before coding.
With material design still relatively new, we’re proud of being able to integrate a lot of material-style UI and Connecting with an external API and learning to read and use their documentation
What I learned
How useful external API’s are and how to read and use external documentation. We wanted to save the world, but there is only so much you can do in less than 24 hours...
What's next for test
Continue building on the web portion of our project. Ensure community members can be aware and to act on the local disasters in order to provide direct relief such as volunteering, providing food and water. We will want to spend more time on more robust map data visualization and connecting the social medium to our application.
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