LivePangaea
Created at the 2019 Fall PennApps
(https://devpost.com/software/livepangaea "LivePangaea's Devpost")
What inspired us
Oftentimes, once a donation is made, donors, through no fault of their own, lose track of where or what their money went towards. With so many layers of bureaucracy and increasingly alarming examples of corruption worldwide, the generous donator's potential for real impact is becoming more and more uncertain.
In making LivePangaea, we hope to slow down and reverse the cynicism that such a system is prone to creating. Our application engages donors, makes being generous a more fulfilling experience, and seeks to connect its users to the people whose lives they've impacted.
LivePangaea uses modern technologies like social networking, data visualization, and seamless mobile payments to bring communities and charities closer together.
How we built it
We built LivePangaea in repl.it using a mix of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and R. Tools including Firebase, Google Trends, Facebook, Bootstrap, and RStudio helped us bring robust functionality to the app such as user authentication, database storage, and dataset integration. The GlobalGiving API gave us access to descriptions and mission statements of charities worldwide. Finally, we used Domain.com to get our website registered and ready for public demoing.
Challenges we ran into
We felt daunted at first by the sheer amount of charitable organizations worldwide, with reputations of varying degrees. It took some wrangling to get data about charities into a format we could incorporate into our workflow.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of the ideas we came up with and of the ambition we had from the start to overhaul the donation experience. After working so hard on this site over the weekend, we've come to believe that there's lots of opportunity for innovation in this space, and we're very proud to have been a part of it - any chance we get to combine our passions for computer science and for helping others is a chance well taken. We're also very happy with the look of our product. It isn't perfect, but we think it's on its way to being very enticing for our target audience.
What we learned
We learned a lot about collaboration, about languages and frameworks, and about dealing with and recovering from frequent hiccups. We faced data loss numerous times throughout the project, but quickly adapted with a solution that allowed us to get up and running again every time.
What's next for LivePangaea
We'd like to take LivePangaea much further with cutting-edge technologies like AR and VR that could make even the greatest distances between donor and recipient feel like no distance at all. We'd also like to build on the social aspect of the app, with features like easily shareable QR codes for matching donations, donation leaderboards amongst friends, and sharing, posting, and tagging through networks like Facebook and Twitter. Lastly, we'd like to further improve the user interface of the web app, to make it even more exciting to be charitable.
Built with...
- html/css/javascript
- bootstrap
- firebase
- facebook - api
- PayPal - api
- twilio
- photoshop
- google cloud
- data.gov api
- global-giving api