CONNECTED

Nothing is more annoying than having to cycle through 5+ different messaging apps for community involvement. With CONNECTED, one app does all: find study partners, join interest groups, and more!

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Inspiration

As undergraduate students, we've all endured the pain of having to download 5+ different messaging apps just to get involved within our campus communities. Some clubs/classes/labs use Discord, some use GroupMe, some use Messenger, and the list goes on. This can get cumbersome, and sometimes just downright annoying. Our vision is to create a platform that encourages community engagement through one single and easy to use app! This platform is not only useful for students, but various other discourse communities in general. Here are just a few examples: activist groups, software engineers, outdoors-persons, concert-goers, gym-goers, astrophiles, python-lovers, and so many more. Being connected within your community(s) has never been easier!

What it does

What CONNECTED does is allow users to voluntarily choose what communities they are involved with, and then be able to interact within their community with ease. Joining one app, users are able to search for others within their community(s), directly or group message them, post discussions and/or reply to other discussion posts, and join groups!

How we built it

We decided to go the web-app route: Python (flask) for the API (backend; application programming interface), Google Firebase for cloud data storage, and JavaScript (reactjs, nextjs) for the UI/UX (frontend; user interface & experience). We followed a common software engineering technique for project management: assigning and completing tickets via GitHub.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was that none of us have any frontend experience whatsoever. Due to this, I, Justin Ventura, took one for the team and spent a lot of time learning React in order to provide our app with some sort of UI. On top of this, we are new to hackathons so there was a bit of a learning curve for us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Justin Ventura: I am proud of the fact I was able to learn React, and create a half-decent looking UI! While I definitely prefer backend work, I'm happy that I was able to learn React on the spot.

Michael Dacanay: I am proud of the the work that the team did to grind it out. I learned some cool things about the Flask dev process and Google Firebase's document/collection model for database.

What we learned

Justin Ventura: I learned a whole lot about React, and front-end development as a whole. I also learned that drawing mocks on an iPad really helps as well!

Michael Dacanay: I really enjoyed working with the team and made plenty of memories! On the tech side, I learned a bit about both the frontend and backend frameworks we used, and the debugging needed to resolve issues.

Bokai Bi: I worked with both Flask and Google Firebase for the first time in this project and learning to use them was super interesting. Being in charge of designing the database and API interactions also gave me insight on how large systems are created and managed. This was my first Hackathon but had lots of fun and made a lot of new cool people!

What's next for CONNECTED

Currently CONNECTED has some of the key capabilities not fully implemented due to hackathon time constraint, and due to our lack of UI/UX experience. So finishing up the frontend would be a good first step. After that, there could be so many cool and useful features to be added with more time such as: a recommendation system for finding groups, profile pages for users to express themselves, a mechanism to setup events, and perhaps even a platform for users passionate about their community to share ideas/solutions/polls. Also, a solution to a problem you may have thought about while reading: how to keep toxic/hateful users and trolls from hurting communities. This is a tough problem in general for any sort of social media platforms, but with Natural Language Processing and Sentiment Analysis systems, this problem could be kept at bay.

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