Inspiration
A few months ago during the Coronavirus pandemic, a new headline was brought up - "Why Farmers are Destroying Millions of Pounds of Food." The reason? Farms were losing their main customers such as restaurants, cruise, and carnivals as the country closed up. Now, farms had up to millions of pounds of food, but no one to take it. With no choice, farmers had to start destroying their crops. The only people still buying fresh produce were supermarkets and consumers. However, even supermarkets could not take all of the farmer's food as they had limited space. Thus, the only line of business left for the farm was the direct consumer. Even though they normally buy produce from supermarkets, buying produce directly from the farmer ensures freshness, a large quantity, and minimal interaction with the food.
Another big inspiration for us was the current state of unemployment. It shocked us that in the United States, 1 out of 10 people does not have a job, largely due to COVID-19.
The last big inspiration for us was the lack of volunteer hours available to high school students due to COVID-19.
When we starting thinking of ideas for this hackathon, we wanted to find a way to get small businesses to be able to sell their products and the unemployed to be able to have a means of making money again.
What it does
Loconomic Fulcrum allows local small businesses (such as farms) to list produce they grow, and also easily hire people for jobs such as the delivery of their products to the consumer. The unemployed (or even volunteers) can list their hours of work. Then, small businesses can look and select who they would like to higher for a certain job.
How we built it
We built the project using a Python web framework model called Flask. We used Python as our backend language, with HTML, CSS, and Javascript on the frontend. We used MongoDB to securely save all our data. We used Bootstrap styles and its grid system in order to ensure our site was mobile-friendly. Heroku was used to host our app. Our development server was a Raspberry Pi.
Challenges we ran into
The main challenge we ran into was organizing our code, due to this project being so big with lots of functionality, it also had LOTS of code in it- with a big file, it was hard to find bits of code and overall be able to map the flow of the application and we saw this problem the most when we joined all the parts of the code together. We got through this though by reorganizing the code so we could understand it better and fix the errors.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Having a working user login/signup and email verification system
- The small business being able to upload listings of their products and customize it by adding images and descriptions of their products so they make it appeal to the customers
- People being able to upload and edit job availability effortlessly
- Small businesses being able to hire easily and safely because they are provided a background check certificate of the person they are hiring
- The ability for volunteers and students in need of volunteer hours to serve and help the community even during Covid-19
- An easy to use, the user interface for searching and purchasing items
What we learned
We learned the importance of refactoring code, as well as the value of a good team and staying positive.
What's next for Loconomic Fulcrum
We plan to integrate the ability for one to use a credit card to pay the small business, as well as more user verification for businesses and workers.
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