Maargdarshak: Connecting Communities
Project Idea and Structure
Introduction
A crowdsourced interactive map for free menstrual products, food pantries, accessible bathrooms, and more!
Awarded Best Hack that Serves Your Community (MLH All In Hackathon Mar 2023)
Inspiration
Our team was inspired by the grassroots efforts working to coordinate community-based mutual aid responses to COVID-19.
We aim to protect and support each other in our own communities and worldwide, particularly in our most vulnerable populations. We are working to support people through crowdsourcing available resources in a community (such as free menstrual products, meals, groceries/food pantries, the location of accessible bathrooms, overnight shelters, and other resources. We are committed to leveraging the strength of our community to support each other.
Problem Statement
Maargdarshak: Community Connect is a website where people can upload the location and type of resource available in any community and other users are able to see those resources (type, location, hours) that are available within a community.
How we built it?
Our website, Maargdarshak , which means "One Who Shows the Path" in Hindi, is built in Wix using Velo for an interactive map of community resources as well as with Twilio. We attempted to incorporate Twilio so that members of a community could upload geo-data directly to the map integration on our website.
We created a group forum for users who are unable to get to the resources in their community can text or call members of the community who are located near the resources and are willing to bring food, groceries, menstrual products, etc to those who need assistance.
Challenges
It was difficult to work across three different time zones.
We're all new to hackathons, so that was a big challenge!
We wanted to create a data pipeline to automatically convert google spreadsheet data to kml format and embed it to google maps, but we found out google maps api doesn't support automating this. We reduced the scope of the project to deal with this issue. We are aware that ArcGIS provides similar functionalities but we were not able to use it since it isn't free.
We could not incorporate Twilio like we wanted to.
Accomplishments
We got the bare bones of our site up and the code is working sometimes.
Learned Something New
We learned to work as a team. Learned about APIs and JavaScript. Learned about connecting user input data to maps and websites.
What's next for Maargdarshak: Community Connect
We have a lot of work to do to bring this concept to fruition.
Languages and Tools:
HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Wix, Google MAP APIs, Velo, Twilio, and Cloud Computing Service
Survey to add more locations: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdD2YPb_RmV2MDQMV6BMHeX_RkSngrqsdybsUuYZLI4sE_luQ/viewform
Feel free to connect with us!
Demo video: Link
Submission on Devpost: Link
Happy Hacking !!