townhall

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Inspiration

This project was inspired by our frustration with the food options near Northeastern’s campus. As we walked by the B. Good, we began talking about how none of us liked the food there and none of us could recall having gone more than once since it opened. This discussion culiminated in a question: why do new businesses have trouble meeting the needs of their communities? We all agreed that there were niches of opportunity for businesses, but new ventures in the area rarely filled those niches. We eventually concluded that entrepreneurs often don’t have a complete understanding of what their potential customer base is looking for, and we sought to create a place where the community and the business creators could meet.

What it does

townhall seeks to improve the process by which new businesses are started, both for the owners of new businesses and the people they are seeking to serve. Uesrs in the community have an opportunity to suggest commercial ventures that they feel would best serve their unique needs and wants in the form of “idea” posts, as well as discuss and rate the suggestions of others in their community. People seeking to start new businesses can use this forum to evaluate the desires of their target community and adjust their ideas accordingly, and then bring their ideas to the community in the form of “venture” posts. Users can also interact with “ventures”, allowing entrepreneurs to judge the community response to their product before taking the risk of making a business out of it.

How we built it

The project was made in the Django framework for Python. We created a database using PSQL that held our user and post information. The front-end was designed in the Bootstrap framework for HTML.

Challenges we ran into

We had originally wanted to create tags that could sort posts into categories, but we had difficulty integrating many-to-many relationship functionality. We also had very little experience with Django, and there were some learning curve spikes that we had trouble getting over.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For a while, it seemed like we weren’t going to be able to create this project at all, so we’re very proud to be able to present a project in semi-completed form. We are also proud of our layout and color scheme, which we think are very aesthetically pleasing.

What we learned

Don’t have two front-end developers using two different versions of Bootstrap. We also learned there was significantly more difficulty in creating a database-driven website than we had originally expected.

What's next for townhall

There is a lot of functionality we would like to implement that we haven’t yet. We’d like to be able to break down desire for specific ideas by neighborhood or region of a city or town, to help entrepreneurs see where the best location would be for their project. We would like to integrate real estate data into the site, so that entrepreneurs could see buildings they could lease or buy to house their projects. We’d also like to be able to link “venture” posts with “idea” posts that inspired them, to let users see when a project they’d expressed interest in as a theoretical idea took a step closer to being a reality. We’d also like to expand the functionality of user profiles, so that they could be used by entrepreneurs to show that they are competent businesspeople. We would also like to create a peer-to-peer messenger for the site. We’d also like to gamify the user experience a little by adding incentives like badges for users.