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CarbonConnect - Mission to Zero Emission
try it out! --> carbonconnect.tech
Inspiration
In the current era of rapid climate change, many companies aspire to reduce their carbon footprint and promote energy-saving behaviors. However, they lack a comprehensive platform that integrates goal setting, transparent tracking, and most importantly, employee participation. Employees, as the primary drivers of organizational change, often don't have a clear view of the company's environmental objectives or a platform to document and share their individual contributions. This gap hinders collective efforts, diminishes productivity, and weakens the shared sense of purpose needed to make tangible contributions to reducing carbon emissions and conserving energy.
The Solution? CarbonConnect — a culture-promoting, social networking platform for companies, focusing on carbon reduction and energy-saving goals. Companies set transparent emission targets, and employees log their individual contributions, fostering accountability and collaborative efforts. These actions can be showcased publicly, recognizing and motivating sustainable behaviors and boosting productivity in the corporate carbon reduction sphere.
What it does
CarbonConnect is multifaceted! It allows an employee to log in to a secure dashboard, where the employee is able to see carbon reduction targets that the company wants them to reach over a given a time period. As the employee completes their tasks, they are also able to log their individual contributions to reducing carbon emissions as fun posts. These posts can then be shared through a company-only feed, or even be sent as a request to appear on the company's public page. Our application also displays the goals and commitments each company has to reducing their carbon emissions, as well as a short blurb about the company's mission statement. This is displayed as a tree that "grows" as the target is closer to being reached. As more registered employees complete their targets, it contributes to the tree growth! This creates an incentivization for healthy competition among companies and employees to make a more carbon negative impact.
How we built it
CarbonConnect is developed entirely over HTML/CSS, JavaScript, and Firebase. We used HTML/CSS for the front-end interface, and JavaScript with Firebase for databasing over the cloud. Firebase was used as a database to hold user credentials, global tasks (deployed by company to employees), and for our posts. It served as a good interface to read and write data to over the cloud, and is a good web host to connect our .Tech domain.
Challenges we ran into
None of us are highly developed programmers, so a significant amount of our time (~6 hours) was spent researching different possibilities of applications and learning the basics of these. It was challenging to build something of this scale with not much web dev knowledge, which made our accomplishments feel all the more sweeter.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are so proud to have produced a working website hosted by a web host that integrates with Cloud Storage over this short amount of time. As a group of 3, we were able to develop a pretty large piece of software (~3000 lines) in only about 15 hours, so that in itself makes us so so happy!
What we learned
For most of us, this was our first time using github for something as large-scale and collaborative as this. Additionally, our skills in terms of web development have been improved so so much as well as UI. We wireframed our ideas beforehand using Figma just because we wanted to learn it, and it was our first time using Firebase as well. Also, learning about domain-to-host connection and databasing over the cloud was so interesting to learn.
What's next for CarbonConnect
We really hope to continue this project after the hackathon because we see so much potential in it! It's so special to us, and we can't wait to iterate upon it and add more advanced functionalities as we get more experienced in software development.
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