Inspiration
Three days into our first week as senior year students, we received an announcement that the school’s administration office workers had collected every item left by students before the holidays. They are giving students one week to retrieve their items from the lost and found storage room before they are disposed of completely. As soon as we walked into the storage room, that was the moment when we noticed a problem that, surprisingly, no one seemed to care about. School uniforms, stationery, art supplies, performance costumes, and items with no owners, all bunched up together as if a small island formation had just teleported to our school.
Some may not notice, but many institutions face challenges with their lost and found cabinets being filled with items that were once owned by others. Keeping these lost items for a long time will not only become an extra burden on inventories but also create unnecessary waste that ends up being thrown into landfills. If this problem keeps unravelling, lost and found items that people associate closely with “useless items” will lose their value, despite some of them still being of decent quality and can be reused by others who need them.
What it does
Bernilai is a lost-and-found collector platform that allows institutions with lost and found cabinets to dispose of their lost and found items through a selective waste disposal mechanism, offering opportunities for these items to get a second chance by being delivered to the people and communities in need, such as local orphanages and nursing homes.
To achieve this, we meticulously created Bernilai’s three main features: Lost-and-Found Collector: To donate used goods to orphanages or nursing homes. Discover Page: To discover local orphanages and nursing homes with maps and find information to further act on it. Utilize AI to dig deeper information with much more versatility instead of hand crafted search functions.
How we built it
First of all, we use figma for the UI/UX design . We used the sustainability theme which includes colors like green and blue. Therefore, the color of our website is dominated by these two colors. We designed it with an easy-to-understand layout so that new users can understand how the website works.
In the meanwhile, one of our teammates designed and coded the discover function. For the official government records, we used AHU public search feature using selenium to then input the name of the organization. To be more accurate, it also considers location to accurately match the description of it.
To find the nearby places, we used hasdata that offers free google maps api. It then receives some basic information such as address and name. But, information such as phone numbers, email, and websites does not appear every time. To solve this, we decided to incorporate gemini’s free api and feed it texts from previously discovered websites that mentions this place as searches for additional information. The websites were discovered through the duckduckgo search engine, searching with a limit of 100 links. This is already plenty enough.
References to social media are also found through duckduckgo, but each link is matched to known reputable sites, indicating that big names had mentioned the place before. Such as banks, universities, and news outlets.
Challenges we ran into
Building Bernilai, sadly, is not as smooth as how Bandung Bondowoso built a thousand temples in one night. We encountered multiple challenges and confusion throughout the journey of making this application.
1) Deciding on which ideas to develop and which tracks to join From the three ideas we initially thought about, we decided to choose the idea that would lead to becoming Bernilai. At first, we couldn’t quite figure out what kind of problems we were trying to solve and what features we should add to the platform. After countless meetings, discussions, disagreements, and confusion, we managed to develop our ideas further as we progressed through the hackathon.
2) Ran out of chances to share projects in Figma When designing the UI/UX for Bernilai, we realised that the account used to create our hackathon application ran out of chances to share projects with others. Thankfully, we managed to connect the front-end design with the back-end programs.
3 Getting a vehicle to the opening ceremony We were supposed to arrive at the hackathon venue by school car. To our surprise, all of the school car that day was occupied. Hence, we had to make a swift online car booking before we eventually arrived at the venue.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Just like the famous quote by Ibu R.A. Kartini, “habis gelap terbitlah terang”, after going through obstacles, we are incredibly proud that we have made it this far:
1) Despite competing in Garuda Hacks 6.0 as high schoolers, the competitive atmosphere drove us to be more determined and motivated to do our best in completing our application in this hackathon. The best part, we successfully submitted our project on time!
2) Making our project’s logo on Day 1 with a digital art application while having zero background in digital art.
3) Finishing the landing page for less then 12 hours.
What we learned
“学习如钻探石油，钻得愈深，愈能找到精髓。” This Mandarin quote we learned at school represents our journey in building Bernilai and developing a deeper knowledge and experience in programming and working as a team. This hackathon taught us that studying is similar to extracting valuable minerals; the deeper we extract, the more resources we can get.
1) We are grateful that through making Bernilai, we learned many new things: Brainstorming, even though it sometimes ends up meeting a dead end, still counts as taking one step closer to figuring things out. Communication is a must! 2) Great features may come from a crazy and wild idea.
What's next for Bernilai
We hope that Bernilai can provide a bridge for individuals and institutions to help local communities sustain their lives by sending basic equipment and daily necessities, while promoting a sustainable lifestyle by conducting selective waste disposal and encouraging a mindset that “segala sesuatu pasti bernilai,” so it is never too late to look for potential purposes that an item can possess when it is reused or given out to someone in need.
In the future, our team is looking forward to: Provide a feature that allows Bernilai users to report items dropped or left by someone in public places. Soon after, proximity notifications will pop up in Bernilai users’ phones to inform them of a lost item discovery. Add a messenger feature to connect Bernilai donors with the orphanages or nursing homes that receive the donation of items and goods, and get to know more about them. Introduce a new menu called “Events”, which shows a calendar with information about the upcoming “Adopsi Barang Bernilai” community event, where anyone can attend to take an item home for free or pay sincerely. Improve our AI assistant chatbot to provide more detailed information about the local communities and organisations in need.
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