Together

Together

Inspiration

Identities are always a part of us and it's hard to find communities that speak to who we are. It's even harder for minorities to find communities in their schools or workplaces. Our app, Together connects individuals to communities their identities align with. In addition to connecting people to diverse communities, Together connects users to specific organization members and allows them to chat and schedule meetings. Together can make an ever larger community impact when used by companies! Many businesses have affinity groups their employees can be part of (e.g Black Employee Network (BEN), Amazon Women in Engineering (AWE)). With Together, employees can easily reach out to existing members and feel like they are seen and heard in their workplace.

Features: What it does

Find communities: Recommendations
Michelle, an Amazon employee signs into Together and selects or types their identities or interests. The Home page uses Michelle's community profile to recommend local or global communities that they might align with. The user can join communities they like, which are linked to their profile.

This feature allows individuals to learn about personalized communities they are interested in.
Grow Connections: Chat
Michelle wants to learn more about African Women in Seattle but can't find the information on the community's description. He chooses to reach out to one of the organization's members via Together. They send each other introductions and set up a call on Monday.

This feature allows users to have a more personalized and direct interaction with the team. Originally, company employees can only reach out to maybe the head of the affinity groups, but this feature allows every member to stay connected, strengthening the underrepresented community's bond.
Impact: Donation
Michelle has been following African Women in Seattle for 3 weeks now. She has attended a movie night hosted by the affinity group. She feels closer to her co-workers and loves how she bring her culture to her workplace. She decides to donate to the group, and her charity supports local black students receive financial aid for their higher studies.

This feature shows how from Michelle's single connection to an affinity group in Amazon, she is able to positively impact many individuals from other corners of the underrepresented community. There is a small and large scale impact of connecting through Together!

How we built it

React Native for front-end cross-platform mobile development
HTML and CSS for layout and styling
Model-View-Controller design pattern and Figma design
Firebase database

Challenges we ran into

Understanding the layout of Firebase. We are all familar with relational database and SQL, but understanding Firebase's collection and documents was difficult. But relating these concepts to ideas we are familiar with helped.
Keeping our customer in mind with every feature. In other words, we needed to make sure that our app didn't turn into any regular social networking application. Instead, it had unique features such as incorporating what company the user is from in their profile and connecting them to regular members- not just the leaders.
Integrating Firebase with the application was difficult since it involved many details in the code. Instead of staring at the code, we decided to understand how the app and database communicate. Understanding this made us understand the code flow better, allowing us to integrate the two parts.

Accomplishment that we're proud of

Overall, we are most proud of how we were able to create an app from the beginning to the end. We used the Model-View-Controller design pattern to sketch the basic idea of our project. Then, we designed how our database would look like, keeping in mind the collection of data we would need such as organizations, companies, and users. Next, we worked towards how the features we wanted should look like, making sure that our customer's experience would be seamless. Ultimately, being able to combine the business goal and technical goal together is our biggest accomplishment!

What we learned

We have become better full-stack developers by integrating a database with an application.
How to meet business and technical needs.
How to better approach ambiguity (by breaking the problem into subsets and tackling each sub-problem)