ReportIt wins overall prize at TriCo Hackathon
I’m pretty thrilled to share that my team won the overall prize at the 2015 TriCo Hackathon. It was my first hackathon, so I wasn’t very sure what to expect, but my friend Sedinam, who was also one of the two other people on my team, talked me into it.
Overall, the hackathon was a very engaging experience. I learned a lot about Flask and the general concept of a web app, but I also learned a lot about hackathon culture. I spent most of my time trying to build up a working app, unaware that I would be judged not on what we had built but on a two-minute demo. That being said, we managed to build a pretty cool, mostly functioning app that now lives on GitHub. Below is the blurb I wrote up about it:
ReportIt was developed by three Swarthmore students to help citizens communicate directly with people in power. It utilizes the power of the crowd to give citizens and their communities a stronger, more public voice.
We chose to make a Web app because of its broad accessibility. Not everyone has a cell phone, but with initiatives like Internet.org, internet access is quickly becoming a global reality. To allow for technological variation, users can submit reports online, via smartphone, or by SMS text messaging. The online platform allows people to report breakdowns in infrastructure and public services, information on disaster relief, corruption, and other issues. All submitted complaints are categorized and mapped using the Google Maps API so that people can easily see what problems are common in their city or region, even if their country does not have a widely used address system. This allows people to see what kinds of services are needed in the region and how they can help, as well as to help them hold their public officials accountable.
We offer an interactive administrator dashboard to help officials see what problems are trending in their region and to help them communicate directly with citizens. There is also a community user dashboard to enable community members to communicate with officials and each other and to further allow easy mobilization to solve problems.
Built by Razi Shaban (@rrshaban), Sedinam Worlanyo (@sedinam), and Amy Han (@raizel17).
ReportIt is built with Flask, SQLite3, Jinja2, gmaps.js, jQuery, and (regretfully) Bootstrap.
Below are some pictures of ReportIt:
We did a writeup for the Swarthmore CS department page and the Philly Inquirer wrote up an article about the hackathon.