Buycott

Buycott is an innovative application that enables users to have a glance at a company's views and standings on several social issues and helps users decide if they want to boycott such companies.

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Inspiration

The inspiration for the idea of this application came from a video that one of the team members, Kaaus, watched regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict. The person on the video was struggling to boycott companies that were against his views regarding this conflict and this called for an innovative solution. After coming across this video, we realized that we needed a tool to help people make better and well-informed decisions based on real-time information and make the process of boycotting a lot simpler for the masses. Boycotting is a very important display of consumer rights and freedom of expression.

What it does

We developed an application that scans the barcode of different products, detects the parent company of the product, and then references new articles related to this company and determines if the company is pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, or neutral. Using this information, and sources supporting the claim, we allow the user to decide whether they should boycott this company.

How we built it

We built this application primarily using Flutter and Flask. We used Flutter for the front end of the application and used Flask as a backend to use APIs. We deployed a flask instance and the NLP model for predicting the stance of the company on Google Cloud.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several issues throughout the development of the application but learned from the mistakes and managed to build a complete implementation of our idea. We had issues with setting up the Android studio and the Flutter software development kit and since all the team members had little to no experience in Flutter, we faced issues getting started with the front end of the application. We also had some issues deploying the flask and NLP model into the Google Cloud because the server was of lower grade and this resulted in our code not getting deployed. We also had issues connecting the front end and the backend as we were met with many errors as well. We were able to overcome all the issues and challenges through persistent efforts, team collaboration, and the precious guidance provided by the MakeUC mentors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the application we were able to develop during the short period as we learned Dart and Flutter and built a mobile app on this within 24 hours. We were also very proud of the positive comments when talking about our idea to mentors. Being a team that has minimal experience in Google Cloud, flutter, and machine learning, we were able to build this application and learned many concepts along the way.

What we learned

As a team, we learned how to delegate tasks, work together, and collaborate by pooling our knowledge together. We learned how to use Google Cloud, trained NLP models, and worked with Flutter to make mobile applications.

What's next for Buycott

In the future, we plan to expand boycotts to address several environmental and social issues and provide users information regarding the involvement of companies in issues relating to pollution, low wages and inhumane working conditions for workers, chemicals used in products that may cause harm, and so on. We want to provide consumers with the information necessary to practice their right to demand the services and ethics expected out of large corporations.

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