Vicinity

Your friendly neighborhood meetup :)

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Inspiration

What inspired us to build Vicinity is that we see a lack of attention on small events hosted by local churches, businesses and schools. As a community, or neighborhood, it’s important for everyone to be on the same page, and support each other.

There are students who lack awareness of local events whether that is a game night or a professional career fair, Vicinity is built to connect that void between people.

In a world where technology is everywhere, we believe that technology should be used as a resource to connect people and organizations, strengthening communities no matter how big or small.

We took a lot of inspiration from Facebook events and the Citizen app and we wanted to make a dedicated application for events with our Vicinity.

What it does

Vicinity is a mobile app that displays communal events happening in an area. Users can post and attend events to their interest, allowing them to meet new people, develop meaningful relationships, and ultimately, foster a closer community.

How we built it

We first had a brainstorming session, thinking about the way that we can represent the community through our product. We looked at who we wanted to impact, and that was people in our local area. One of the problems we saw was that there are so many apps and websites, and although there is so much going on, everything seems so separate and individualistic. We ended up focusing on events, and creating a platform that promotes one universal place.

Our next steps were to wireframe, and sketch out a base idea of what we wanted. We decided on a mobile app, and from there a prototype of what it looked like would be made in Figma.

While this was happening, we worked on building the app’s structure. Knowing the features and segments we wanted to include in the app, we started on creating a database, importing a map, and overall developing the backend of the app.

Once we had a visual sketch of the app, we were able to put everything together! We used HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build the app, and after many ‘ERROR’ codes and missing semicolons, we created Vicinity. :)

Challenges we ran into

This was a ‘learn as we go’ situation as most of us have not had much experience in programming and development. We had to scrape some of the databases that we are trying to build before we settle with our current solution.

Our biggest challenge was getting the backend of our application to work. To emphasize, we wanted to use MongoDB for our backend to store our information. But Mongo was just not collaborating with us so we looked for other databases. And we switch over to Google Firebase to store our data. And we hope to continue using that and implementing it into our application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are all first-time ‘hackers’, and definitely walked into this hackathon feeling underprepared and out of place. However, we are proud to have persevered and created a product that we believe is meaningful, and are so excited for more opportunities to learn more and expand our knowledge.

(Also the logo is pretty cool too)

What we learned

We don’t want to code ever again. Plus the people in Start-Up made it look easier than it actually is.

We learned A LOT. In an environment where we were encouraged to be ambitious, ask questions, struggle, and experience as much as we could, we took away a lot. We learned how to use Figma, how to use HTML/CSS, how to implement databases to store information, we were learning the whole entire time as we built Vicinity.

Looking back, we are proud of our work as compared to before the event, we now know so much more and will use these skills in the real world, in class, and future hackathons!

What's next for Vicinity

Though we are proud of Vicinity, we also know that there is a lot more room for growth. There were many ideas that we were not able to implement into this project, and are very excited to see what we can do with this app with more resources and time. We genuinely hope that this app can be used to connect people and that it can make a little impact in our communities.

We hope that Vicinity connects people to people. We hope that this would allow people to be more aware of events happening around them. Whether that is a simple hang out at a school spot to allow small artists to promote events to networking opportunities, we hope that Vicinity allows the community to connect.

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