Impact DFW

Inspiration

While there are many who are blessed, there are many who are deprived of the basic worldly necessities. Let’s look at some facts:

• Dallas has the highest number of people living 185 percent below the poverty line of any city in America. • Forty-eight percent of Dallas single mothers live in poverty, crippling their ability to provide for their children. That number has steadily grown since 2005. • Thirty-eight percent of Dallas children live in poverty. Twenty-eight percent of them have inadequate food and nutrition.

In a world where people are throwing away their extra or old items like food, books, toys, medicines, Medicare equipment, furniture etc. Every day, there are many people who could use those items to improve their life if only we would share a little bit of the extra, we have. What some of us consider worthless may be a treasure to many. That’s why we have developed an apps/website where we have connected donors (who have extra/throw away items), seekers (who are in need) and volunteers with each other and figured out a way by which they can be connected, and exchange of items can take place.

What it does

Our app or the system will connect donors who have extra/throw away items for example foods, books, toys, clothes, home appliances, Medicare equipment with seekers who needs those items and volunteers who will assist in delivering those items to a certain location in a pigeonhole deposit box with digital locker just to avoid the physical contact between donors and seekers. Locker boxes with digital locks will be available in all communities. The system shall scan the The system will have the option to keep their identities hidden if they are willing to.

The apps will have an option to register someone as donors, volunteers, and seekers. If the seeker does not register, s/he can still access our system and seek for items s/he requires. In our model, • When the donors register, s/he can post, add an image and the description of the items. S/he will have to mention the quantity as well. • The seeker can access our system from a website or smart phone. If they don’t have access to anyone, a kiosk shall be installed in every locality with the donation from church/residents from the locality from where our apps or website can be accessed.  If they have a user id, they can log in but if they don’t have user id, they can access our system, but their photos will be captured by the device (whether phone or kiosk) they are using.  Once the user(seeker) is into the system, s/he will have to select the specific items s/he is looking for based on the category given in the systems. The user can select multiple items at the same time.  When the user confirms the items, it will look for the items in the systems. If the system finds any donor, it will be notified to the seeker and another notification will be sent to the donor if they want to keep the item in the deposit box or s/he wants a volunteer to pick up the items and keep them in the deposit box.
 If the donor prefers to put the items in deposit box, the donor will feed the time into the system when s/he will be to keep the item in the deposit box. Then the system will scan the deposit box and assign a deposit box number to the donor in which donor will keep the item. A notification will be sent to the seeker informing the digital locker number, an OTP and the time the item will be available. • If the donor is not able to keep the item him/herself in the digital locker, the system will send out a message like UBER does to all the volunteers who will pick up the items from the donor and keep it in a deposit box with digital lock.  If a volunteer accepts the lookout message sent by the systems, a onetime password will be sent to the seeker for the deposit box where his or her items will be kept and the volunteer will receive the deposit box number and then go to donor’s location, pick up the items, keep in the specific deposit box, and update the info in the system.
 To recruit volunteers, we can contact the high school students who are required to do a certain number of hours as community service. We can also reach out to the city courts judges and request him to assign the offender with petty crimes to work as a volunteer for us as a community restitution. We can also contact USPS to act as a volunteer for us. • If the seeker picks up the items from the digital box by using his OTP, that info will be updated in the system.

How we built it

When beginning this project, I had a rough idea of the technologies that would be required. I would need a basic database that would sign users in and hold data for the rest of the users to pull from. I would need a way to find the location of users (consensually) to feed into my database, and I would need a way to display the data stored on my backend. I first concluded that Firebase would be the best way to get a quick, up-and-running database for the challenge. Funnily enough, Firebase has caused more headaches alone than all of the other technologies combined. I also quickly found that Google Maps would be the best way to display my data and was fortunate enough to have someone from another team come and debug the API with me (curse you Scaffolds!). The Graphical User Interface was heavily inspired by a YouTuber named Mitch Koko. Since Dart and Flutter are still very new and don’t have as much support from the greater community as other languages/frameworks, Flutter can be both a nightmare and a blessing, but it tends to lean on the nightmare side most of the time.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges was ensuring the security of each party involved. That is why in this model the identity of both the donor and seeker would be kept hidden and exact location sharing wouldn’t be there for the donor to seeker model. Another big challenge was that of the commute for the seeker to collect the donation from donor. To mitigate this issue, we have kept a volunteer model where seekers can ask volunteers to collect donations from far distances and deliver.

The other challenge was developing a working prototype of the project. With little coding knowledge and app development background we still managed to develop a structure of the type of app and website we are looking for that would be extremely easy for the user to use.

The technical challenge was to write the data in the data server in firestorm. We tried to get help from the mentors and still couldn’t figure it out in a short span of time. With more time allocated to work on that, we could mitigate the issue further.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that this idea will leave an impact that is everlasting. We would be able to connect the deprived with the blessed ones. The world is a better place if we share our resources and help each other out. In a short span of time, we have successfully brainstormed and developed a solution that can solve most important problems in the society.

This platform is not designed for just the people who can’t afford but also for people who are at a difficult stage of life. Let’s say students to find items they need. The hope is that these very people in later stage of life would convert into a donor from seeker to keep the cycle of Impact going. The aim of the platform is not to eradicate hunger, poverty from the world but to start a revolution where everyone shares their leftover with ones in need. Not just food but books, toys etc. We would count our biggest accomplishment as the moment when most of the seekers convert into a donor themselves when they reach a better stage in their lives.

What we learned

What we learned from this rigorous event is, programmers have no age. Our 14-year-old teammate surprised us with his talent to learn off Firebase and flutter in just few hours and programmed an almost working prototype in this short span of time.
We also learned firsthand project management and critical thinking for problem solving. These experiences have helped us how real-world projects are managed and successfully deployed better.

What's next for Impact DFW

The next step for Impact DFW is to increase the availability of the platform to other cities within Texas and move to other states and globally too if habit can be formulated and the act of impacting each other’s lives is spread enough. Another set of improvement that we look forward to is to increase the category count to almost everything that people can donate including services.