InfraWatch

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Reports in System Colors by Priority
Database with New Entries
WireFrame in Figma

Inspiration

"There is a water main break every two minutes and an estimated 6 billion gallons of treated water lost each day in the U.S., enough to fill over 9,000 swimming pools."

"Growing wear and tear on our nation's roads have left 43% of our public roadways in poor or mediocre condition, a number that has remained stagnant over the past several years."

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, America's infrastructure has scored a C-.

Whether it be malfunctioning traffic lights that cause traffic or potholes that result in a bumpy ride, we have had our fair share of poorly maintained infrastructure. This needs to change. Everyone deserves to have well-maintained infrastructure given that they are heavily taxed.

We wanted to create a solution that would not only help the government quickly identify infrastructure issues, but also hold these officials accountable to make sure that the people's tax dollars are put towards the betterment of society.

What it does

Our application will allow users to make reports on any infrastructure issues they find around them, simply through pictures. Once the user has taken a picture and added a name, a description can be added to better reflect the extent of the problem. Once published, others in the neighborhood can view these reports, choosing to either upvote or downvote these issues based on how important they believe this problem is. If many users report the same issue, the issue is given a higher priority. Based on these rankings, government officials will be able to quickly identify and work to solve these issues.

How we built it

We used Figma for our prototype and for our technical implementation, we built a React app with a Google Firebase Firestore and Authentication backend. For the frontend, we used css, js, jsx, and html.

Challenges we ran into

We have never used Firebase or React before and it was insanely difficult to find good tutorials/resources that were not outdated. We also had limited experience with JS and front end. In addition to this, the time limit made it very hard to backtrack and try something else.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that for the very first time, we have a working technical implementation with a database. Despite using languages and frameworks we have never even heard about about till now, we managed to build a whole web app and we are very proud of that.

What we learned

We learned a lot about different technologies and had a chance to implement what we have learned in our classes. In addition to that, we also learned that sometimes, we need to take breaks and be calm when things don’t work. It’s probably a very small issue and when we take a couple seconds to sit back and think about it, we can figure out anything.

What's next for InfraWatch

The next step would be to incorporate the photograph feature in the web app. We were unable to use Firebase storage without upgrading but with a little more research, we should be able to find a low-cost solution. We will also work towards implementing this in our neighborhoods to help the community!