GeeLink

Inspiration

Refugee camps are a failure of an institution: even though their whole purpose is to be a temporary location for refugees to get back on their feet, most refugee camps are instead becoming places where refugees are stuck in for years or even decades, with no foreseeable end to the wars from which they are fleeing. And, because refugees are kept away from European towns in order to prevent them from taking up jobs that could be filled by local workers, refugees are kept in a state of purgatory, forced to survive on limited supplies from relief agencies and governments while being kept unemployed and without any educational infrastructure. Our goal as the team of GeeLink is to create a dynamic and multi-platform WebApp that can help inspire productivity in young refugees and help make up for the lack of infrastructure within refugee camps.

What it does

GeeLink connects refugees based on their interests, skills, and location. On our WebApp, a user can create interest groups and join other interest groups which are within the user's desired radius from his/her location. This allows users to connect with other refugees within a reasonable distance and propagate specialized information with other refugees who are like-minded. This means that refugees can easily educate each other and learn new things through joining groups on our WebApp. Furthermore, these groups can serve as places of solace for refugees feeling lost in an unfamiliar environment, allowing refugees to comfort each other. In addition, this WebApp creates an easy and simple way for like-minded individuals within refugee camps to group together and collaborate on group projects.

How we built it

We used Ruby-on-Rails to build the WebApp and deployed it using Heroku

Challenges we ran into

We tried implementing other features as well such as a chatbot on Facebook through Api.ai, but we had difficulty integrating the chatbot built on Api.ai with our website made with Ruby-on-Rails. Furthermore, Ruby-on-Rails has a fairly difficult learning curve and since most of our members did not previously know how to use RoR, it took a while for us to utilize this powerful software.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We learned how to use Ruby-on-Rails to successfully create a basic website that includes most of our planned functionalities.

What we learned

Learning a framework took longer than we anticipated.

What's next for GeeLink

We have big dreams for this WebApp. We are going to create a chatbot that can interact with users and easily connect them to like-minded people as well as introduce them to new groups.