The Civic List

Inspiration

After a conversation with a friend about the difficulties they faced finding volunteer opportunities while studying abroad, the idea for this website was born. My friend was eager to give back to the community and make a positive impact, but found that the resources available were scattered and hard to navigate. I realized that many people, not just those studying abroad, must face the same challenge when looking for civic participation activities. I wanted to create a platform that could make it easier for people to find and engage in the kind of meaningful volunteer work they were looking for. This website is the result of that vision, an open source collection of civic participation activities, designed to empower people to make a difference in their communities, and make it easy for them to connect with others who share their passion for making an impact.

What it does

The Civic List allows users to aggregate and share links to various civic participation activities in a specified location. Upon sharing, anybody will be able to quickly see all opportunities in their area.

How we built it

I used Velo by Wix to develop the platform, specifically the following Velo components:

Collections Database to store user entered data.
Google SSO to allow for easy account creation.
Google Maps to display the locations of each civic activity.
Velo Dataset APIs to query collections and insert data.
Velo Table/Input/Button APIs to create a custom search bar that displayed results in a table

Challenges we ran into

The Velo Platform had a slight learning curve since you have to use their APIs as opposed to the browser APIs you may be familiar with but the documentation and forum provided all the information I needed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm happy that I was able to take this from an idea to an end product. Implementing it in Velo was challenging at times but the feeling of pushing through and figuring out a way around obstacles will always be unmatched.

What we learned

I learned a lot about the Velo platform and how it can simply the process of creating a CRUD web application. Specifically, I learned about using Collections to stored data and how to add custom capabilities to UI elements using the Velo APIs.