Inspiration
We wanted to make something that would help the low-income community, particularly street vendors (pedagang kaki lima), who don't have access to a landed restaurant or any other online platforms where they can market themselves and showcase their services. Hence by making a special platform for them, we hope to share their business with the larger community. Not only that, but street vendors make up more than half of Indonesia's economy, so it's frustrating that many struggle to make ends meet despite being key contributors to their country. Although some street vendors are quite popular and receive huge influxes of customers every day, other street vendors are not as successful due to their location and lack of customers. Not to mention these street vendors have been preserving authentic Indonesian cuisine for decades. So, we thought, what if we built a platform where these street vendors can advertise themselves? That's how we came up with Gerobakku — the desire to provide low-income communities with the resources and opportunities to reach people they have not been able to reach, while also preserving our authentic cuisine for future generations. In addition, our goal is also to bust myths about street vendors, including that they're "unsanitary" or "low-quality". We're also inspired by current economic disparities in Indonesia, which is why we came up with Gerobakku to bridge the gap between the low-income and the wealthy and grant street vendors the same resources as everybody else.
What it does
Gerobakku aims to improve the economy of Indonesia’s low-income community, especially the street vendors or “pedagang kaki lima”. Similar to a food review app, Gerobakku allows street vendors to set up an online profile where they can display their menu, services, and personal stories, allowing others to find them via the app. Users can search for specific street vendors or explore new ones to try. Users can also leave a review and a donation for street vendors they enjoyed, which not only empowers and motivates the vendors to improve their business, but also encourages other users to try out the street vendor! What makes Gerobakku unique is our main feature — a public map that displays the location of all registered vendors live as they move around the city! This map allows street vendors to view areas with high concentrations of other street vendors so that they can locate their carts (gerobaks) accordingly. It also ensures that users can easily locate moving street vendors they previously enjoyed and that they, when in need of food, can simply view the map to see the nearest vendors to them. This makes interactions between street vendors and customers more efficient, as they can communicate directly online, which creates more opportunities for the vendors to showcase their food and services and increase their sales. At the end of the day, Gerobakku is a platform where street vendors can finally voice themselves and interact with their community — or even people outside their community — more efficiently.
How we built it
Initially, we planned to tackle down the toughest challenge we had which was integrating a GPS system that allows multiple people to view each others moving location since we had the least confidence in getting this part working. We started of using an open source code from github called leaflet GPS and understand important parts of their code to modify it, mostly using javascript. From there, we modified the initial code which only allowed offline single device gps to be able to make it online and share location of multiple. Then we used node.js and used heroku cloud service to be able to view the online location of multiple people. After we get those done, we had to design the front-end system and we chose to use bootstrap framework to get it done.
Challenges we ran into
Firstly, we had to integrate a map with working GPS system to a web app. This was a great concern to all of us at the beginning since we never had any experience close to it. After finding an open source github repository able to track live GPS location, we had to modify many parts of it to make it suit our needs such as online live location for multiple people. We had to carefully go through the github repo and understand their code which took a significant amount of time. Not only that, full-stack development was also a great challenge we had to overcome since none of us had that experience of coordinating and joining different parts of a platform together.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we were able to be resourceful and solve the technical challenges that comes up with our unique idea. We had to debug various errors that come up and look for ways to resolve them as a team under the time pressure set by the hackathon. Modifying the open source library to allow multiple users was definitely the toughest technical challenge we had to go through. There were multiple times throughout the hackathon where we felt really hopeless and certainly want to give up on this idea. However, all of us tried our best to push through, and we're proud of being one step closer towards empowering our unique street vendors, one gerobak at a time.
What we learned
We learned that our coding skills can come into use in helping the community, especially low-income communities, in our case by enhancing their economic opportunities. Additionally, we learned many new technical coding skills. With the variety of skills of our members, each of us learned a thing or two from one another. In general, we all learned how to code a full-stack website. Moreover, this team work opportunity taught us how to merge our work into one using github.
What's next for Gerobakku
We will further develop and add features to Gerobakku into a full-fledged app. Firstly, we will add a user system where users can perform various actions such as giving rating, feedback, and more. As a result, a proper development of a backend system to allow login and registration for our users and sellers is needed. The users will be able to search for gerobaks and navigate to them as well as give ratings and see information of the gerobak. On the other hand, the sellers will be able to set up their gerobak with information such as menus, pricelist, and more. Of course, we will visit various pedagang kaki limas around town and explain how our app can help their business, and afterwards help them set up accounts for it. When the app is finally completed, we could offer it to big companies such as Gojek or Grab to implement this into their applications, further helping the pedagang kaki lima of Indonesia.
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