VolunTrack

Inspiration

We all are avid volunteers, and enjoy serving our community whenever we can. However, we notice various inefficiencies and ways that bad actors can harm the integrity of volunteer events. In addition, it is sometimes difficult to find events in the area. We envision a volunteer management system that streamlines the entire process, allowing volunteers to focus on what really matters: making the world a better place. In addition, we have a "volunteer hub" for volunteers to find events that interest them as well as connect with like-minded volunteers.

What it does

Our application streamlines the volunteer process from start to finish. We allow a user to both volunteer and organize events. We use QR code technology to automatically track attendance and checked in/out users. All a user has to do is scan in and out, nothing else needed. Using this information, we show various metrics about events, including past events that the user volunteered for or organized. In addition, we have a volunteer hub; this uses geolocation to find events in the area, as well as connect the user to various volunteers/organizers.

How we built it

We built a mobile app using React Native. This allows us to make a cross platform mobile application without having to write two separate apps. We use a Firebase Realtime Database instance as a backend, storing all the information for users and events.

Challenges we ran into

We were all very new with the structure and syntax of NoSQL query design and syntax. We had several challenges with queries and maintaining the integrity of our system. However, we diligently worked towards solving these problems, and we overcame many of these challenges.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We all came into this hackathon very motivated, but with little knowledge of developing a mobile app. We are very proud of the fact that we created a full app in the past two days, and gained invaluable knowledge on software development, databases, and working together in a team.

What we learned

We gained much knowledge on database design, querying said data, and displaying it to the end user. We learned a lot on what it means to be a full stack mobile developer.

What's next for VolunTrack

We plan on massively expanding the volunteer hub, as well as adding a "for you page", filled with even more options and fields for customization, allowing users to find the events they are interested in much easier.