Team name: Connect 4 Community

Inspiration

Seeing as the goal of this hackathon is to bring about change in the world of digital accessibility, we looked towards some issues many marginalized groups face on a daily basis. According to a variety of studies, there is an increased number of single black mothers as well as an elevated occurrence of loneliness and depression in the same population, not to mention the racism that members of the black community face on a regular basis.

Oftentimes, the feeling of loneliness stems from the feeling that no one else is going through what you are going through, and that there is no one to talk to about your problems. Speaking from our team members’ personal experiences entering university, one might often feel as if nobody else has problems with time management or keeping up with the course material. However, upon hearing others say that they feel a similar way, the feeling of loneliness dissipates as the understanding arises that we are all in this together.

As a result of this, our team decided to attempt to combat these issues by providing a networking and support service aimed at improving the lived experience of the community (such as single black mothers), where people of all backgrounds are welcome to participate.

What it does

Connect is an online support platform in which members may create a profile and share their experiences with other individuals going through similar troubles. Individuals may also view other’s posts and reply with their own ideas, engaging in meaningful discussion. Whether it be stories, experiences, or issues they face, Connect hopes to establish a welcoming and inclusive community in which people can share the burden and find support to spread positivity.

How we built it

Connect’s online platform was built using a variety of programming languages, such as Python, HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and tools such as flask, SQLite, and Bootstrap. After our goal was chosen, we started by planning and drawing the general layout of the website by hand. Then, the webpages were built from HTML while adding CSS for design and Javascript for animations. To swap pages and interact with the database, Python’s Flask micro web framework was chosen because Python is the language our team is most familiar with.

Challenges we ran into

All of our team members were new to hackathons and did not have much experience building websites or interacting with databases, meaning that there was a lot of learning (Googling) the technical skills required to start this project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have created a working website that incorporates many different technical elements such as styling and interacting with databases, as well as hosting it on a public domain.

What we learned

Through our preliminary research, we learned more about problems that are more prominent in black communities. Through the website creation process, we have learned how to use different frameworks and tools for building websites.

What's next for Connect

Next steps for our website are to ensure that people can feel safe while accessing our website. This includes adding account creation and login features that have some sort of verification that they are a real person. There also needs to be a moderation or filtering system in place that can catch or flag potential hateful posts and replies.