Inspiration
Finding things to do as a young person in Toronto can be tough. Growing up, I rarely ever participated in events or activities in my city. But now, coming to university, I've begun to see the exact opposite happen. The difference? In university, it's much easier for me to access information about what's happening nearby, and it has helped so much in broadening my horizons. Therefore, we wanted to create a place where youth can find out what's going on near them and explore their specific interests.
What it does
Toronto for Us is a web app designed to allow youth to search for events near them filtered by category. This includes items such as festivals, community centre programs, outdoor spaces, and other public events.
How we built it
We built Toronto for Us as a web app using Flask, with an interactive map powered by Folium and Leaflet. We brought together Toronto activity and event data, including data from Toronto Open Data, and organized it into categories such as parks, community centres, programs, and festivals. Users can filter what they see, and the map and nearby results update as they move around the city.
Challenges we ran into
One challenge was working with differently formatted datasets. Another was the size of the data which needed to be accessed without making the entire app slow down.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We’re proud to have brought different kinds of local activities together in one place and made them explorable through an interactive map. We also built filters to help users narrow down what they’re looking for, and improved the map so nearby results can update as users explore. For data in a non-geospatial format, we combined datasets to be able to display the relevant information on the map.
What we learned
We learned how much work goes into turning public datasets into a useful experience. This includes dealing with inconsistent data, filtering and deduplicating, and combining sources.
What's next for Toronto for Us
Next, we want to make Toronto for Us be even more tailored to young people. That means adding more interest-based filters, filters for cost and other preferences, and bringing in more sources of events and activities so users can find options that suit them (for example, using Eventbrite). We also want to focus on user safety and connect people with aids for discovering and accessing mental health or protective services near them.
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