EmpowerNet

Home + Highlights
Tinder-Style Swiping for Network
Swipe Left
Swipe Right
View Your Network
Scrollable Companies List
Company Profile and Ratings
Company Reviews
Submit a Rating
Inbox
Chat History
Your Profile

Inspiration

As a team made up of minorities (women, LGBTQ+, racially underrepresented, etc.) in tech, we realized the need for a platform to empower marginalized groups through their network (EmpowerNet). We truly believe in the saying "Your Network Is Your Net Worth" and felt that there was tremendous potential in an app like this to help minorities build their networking foundations. Our goal is to encourage minorities, especially women, to leverage the wealth of knowledge in their networks by bridging the communication gap. Ultimately, we envisioned a hub for our peers to lift each other through their current positions and build lasting connections for the rest of their career.

Our past experiences also taught us that members of minority communities have varying needs and desires from their place of work. Meeting them can make the difference between sustaining the growing numbers of underrepresented individuals in tech and reverting back to the diversity and equity dilemma in the industry. To practically implement a solution for this, we included a section where users can view comprehensive rating criteria for companies for categories ranging from company culture to diversity or even career growth. In addition, users can share their past experiences by contributing to a company's rating and leaving a written review. Transparency was at the core of our vision for these sections.

Finally, additional details such as a resume-style profile for each member, inbox/chatting feature for communication, and a dashboard that quickly provides access to each account's highlights create an enriched UI/UX experience.

What it does

Networking: Tinder-style swiping to build connections and view member profiles

Companies: List of top companies to review or view reviews from other members, ratings summary and breakdown by category with form to submit your experience

Inbox: Chat history and communication portal

Home: Account highlights

Profile: Resume-style profile with additional values to promote transparency such as current salary and introductions

How we built it

We primarily relied on React Native to build out the mobile application.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was managing our time as we had quite a few features to implement and a very slow speed of development.

Our team also had a lack of UX design experience so we needed to get a good amount of advice from CTC members/leadership.

Three out of our four members were using React Native for the first time so there was an initial learning curve to overcome.

VSCode liveshare issues! Integrating Firebase ...so much more

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The number of features we were able to put together in some capacity with our limited time and experience

How the UI turned out much nicer than we initially planned

What we learned

Each of us had pretty diverse technical experiences (frontend, backend, React framework, prototyping, databases, etc.) so we were able to learn many tidbits from each other over the weekend. We also learned the importance of keeping an open mind and positive attitude when things were failing or errors kept arising.