Code:Pride

Inspiration

Hate Crime is a serious issue faced by the society. Just the day before yesterday, a 26 yr old Indian Techie was shot dead in Baltimore, USA. Today, there was a shooting in a gay nightclub. Due to these events, we thought a Hate Crime prevention project would be appropriate for the hackathon. After doing some research we were stunned to find the below facts: Stats for Hate Crimes. We also saw the Youtube Video of the famous 911-Pi$$a call and decided to do that, but way better.

What it does

With our App, Victims/Witnesses can report a Hate crime by disguising it as a Pi$$a order. Users will get randomised codewords for making an order, and we'll decode this accordingly to get their hidden input and send it to the authorities and their emergency contacts along with their location. Users can also use the live-conference feature to do the same if they are relatively safe but still in danger. We also have a global chat forum where Users can interact. Any alerts from above will also be shown here so that the community can take action. In case its not safe for the user to manually compose a Pi$$a order, we also have an emergency mode where we automatically take user location and send the SMS in just a press of a button. We also have a news section which stays up-to-date regarding matters of the LGBTQ community.

How we built it

We used Firebase for Authentication and Cloud Firestore for the global chat forum. We used a Flutter plugin for the speech-to-text functionality. We also used the Agora RTC SDK for live conference feature. We used geolocation to get the User's position and pass it to Google Maps to generate a link that plots a trip to the user's location. We used Twilio API to send the SMS. Then, we used the NewsAPI for the ... you guessed it... News section.

Challenges we ran into

The randomisation process code was very hard to debug, considering that some codewords get abbreviated by the s2t plugin. Ex. "Barbeque" becomes "bbq". There were lots of UI and contextual issues while making the chat forum. We also wanted to implement one-to-one chat and group chat but weren't able to because of time shortage and other pending features.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First of All, After making this app we feel like we have done something good and positive in our life that can potentially benefit hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Apart from that, i am really proud to have made a working chat feature with absolutely no idea on how to do it at the beginning. We weren't able to grasp how to plot the GMaps trip from just the Lat,Long position of the user as there was no API for that, then we realised... we didn't need one. This gave us a lot of confidence in getting to do the nitty-gritty code-work without relying on the framework's resources.

What we learned

This was my First time using Streams for listening to Realtime changes in the chat forum and its an amazing concept which i think will pair well with my WebSocket ideas for making group-chat a reality. This was also the first time we used CircleCI and its an amazing tool that we'll continue to incorporate in our future projects.

What's next for $$$$-$$$$

We would be adding a blogging feature that would scrape relevant articles from various sources and display them here.
We would continue working on the group-chat and one-to-one chat feature.
We would also add social media integrations inside our App.