Inspiration
With the increase of dangerous situations in schools like violent intruders, I thought it could be useful to have a way to quickly send important information to lots of people at the same time. Since people usually have their phones on them, I figured SMS communication would be the easiest to use in a chaotic situation like that.
What it does
The website provides a way to opt-in to this mass messaging service and also allows users to send important information to everyone on the contact list. Via SMS and Email. Recent alerts are also displayed on the home page.
How I built it
I used flask which is a python web framework along with twilio for SMS communication and gmail for email communication. I also used bootstrap for the frontend UI elements.
Challenges we ran into
A lot of time was spent managing the database to hold the contacts and the alerts because it has been a while since I have done something like that, but besides the few roadbumps from using external APIs it was surprisingly smooth.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I'm pretty proud that I made what looks to me like a not-totally-unfinished project for this hackathon.
What we learned
I learned that its surprisingly simple to add SMS and email communication to my projects.
What's next for Emercontact
Some stuff I was planning to do for this hackathon but didnt get to were user authentication to avoid people misusing the system and also different contact methods / groups to more efficiently send information.
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