UAber

Inspiration

We know that there are many refugees waiting at the Ukrainian border and many drivers in Poland who are willing to help them get to their first destination after crossing the border, so we sought to match them up in the hopes of getting more people to safety faster.

What it does

UAber allows drivers to sign up to drive Ukrainian refugees that just crossed the Polish border. Border authorities can use the app to match groups of refugees with nearby drivers in order to help them get to a safe place in Poland.

After a driver signs up, they enter their car model and colour, as well as how many seats they have available, and a rough estimate of their destination. When the driver is ready to pick up a group of refugees, they check in near a border crossing.
A border authority will match up incoming refugees with the driver, based on the group size and and their destination. The refugees are given a rough location of the car, and a short alphanumeric code to identify their driver. This code is also shown to the driver. The driver could make a sign with their code on it (on paper, or on a tablet screen) so they are easier to identify.
The refugees meet the driver and get on their way. Before leaving, the driver indicates that they are starting the trip.
Upon arrival, the driver indicates that the trip is finished.

We initially played with the idea of allowing every refugee to use the app on their own. However, we learnt during the hackathon that many refugees either will not have a smart device with internet connection, or their battery might be dead after travelling for a long time. In the future, the app could be adapted to allow refugees to directly request a pick-up at the border, without the border authority as a middleman.

How we built it

We used Figma for the mockup and FastAPI for an initial version of the web framework.

Challenges we ran into

With the team in different time-zones and the hackathon being a mid-week event, we had a limited amount of time to work together. Furthermore, the exact requirements for our application were vague at best, since we had no direct communication with the Polish government. Our (functional) design is thus based on the experiences of the speakers at the Code4Ukraine hackathon, and our own assumptions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have many of our views visualized in Figma.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the current situation in and around Ukraine, and what the struggles of many refugees currently are. On a technical level, we learned how to animate some components in Figma.

What's next for UAber

We want to finish implementing the web app, to have a real impact on the situation at the Polish-Ukrainian border. There are still plenty of problems to tackle.

Built With

fastapi
figma
mongodb
python

Submitted to

Code4Ukraine

Created by

I mainly worked on the functional design of the application. Mapping out what is required from each user's point of view, and what the typical usage flow will be. Working out a big idea in little time proves to be more difficult than one would expect. I also learned the very basics of Figma and helped create a mockup of our application.

Andele Swierstra
I worked on the Figma mockup, so I designed the web app and created all of the interactive elements for the prototype. I learned how to animate some components by working on this project. I'm usually working on backend during hackathons, so I enjoyed being able to work on the visualization this time.

Abigail Nacional
Michał Krawczak
Rav944