ShareNet homepage — a verified campus sharing economy where students rent, sell, give, and save money together.
Core pillars of ShareNet: item sharing, campus-only access, trust scoring, reminders, Lost & Found, and private chat.
Marketplace feed with filters and ML-powered “Picked for You” recommendations ranked by trust, relevance, and recency.
Personal dashboard to manage listings, toggle availability, and control rent/sell/give items in one place.
Demand-driven Wanted Board where students post needs, receive offers, and match with peers instantly.
Real-time alerts for offers, claims, transactions, and chat updates — keeping every campus interaction transparent.
Structured Lost & Found system with verified claiming, recovery tracking, and campus-wide resolution status.

ShareNet — A Verified Campus Sharing Economy

Inspiration

Every college campus has the same hidden inefficiency:

Students spend thousands on items they only need for a few weeks
Lost belongings disappear because recovery systems are fragmented
WhatsApp groups are chaotic and unstructured
OLX/Facebook marketplaces have strangers, scams, and zero trust

We realized something powerful:

Campuses already have everything students need —
they just don’t have a trusted way to share it.

That insight became ShareNet:

A verified, intelligent campus-sharing economy where students can safely rent, sell, give, recover lost items, and request what they need — all inside their own college network.

What it does

ShareNet turns every college into its own trusted marketplace.

With ShareNet, students can:

📦 Rent / Sell / Give items in one seamless listing flow
🔍 Recover lost belongings with verification-based claiming
📣 Post Wanted Requests and receive competing peer offers
💬 Chat instantly with real-time messaging, images, GPS, and meetups
⭐ Earn behavioral trust scores based on transaction outcomes
🤖 Discover items faster through ML-powered recommendations

Everything is campus-scoped:

A student at IIIT Lucknow will never see listings from IIT Bombay.

It’s not just a marketplace — it’s a self-regulating campus economy.

How we built it

ShareNet is a full-stack, production-grade platform built with real-world architecture.

🎨 Frontend

React 19 + Vite for a fast SPA experience
Tailwind CSS design system for clean, scalable UI
Zustand state management for modular store architecture

Transaction-scoped flows for:

Items
Requests
Claim queues
Wanted offers

⚙️ Backend

Node.js + Express REST API
MongoDB Atlas + Mongoose schemas with indexes and lifecycle tracking
JWT + Refresh Token authentication for secure sessions
Cloudinary media pipeline for uploads
Resend OTP verification for trusted college identity

🔄 Real-Time Engine (Socket.IO)

We built an event-driven communication layer supporting:

Private chat rooms per transaction
Typing indicators + live notifications
Image + location sharing
Meetup proposal workflows

All messages are persisted, ensuring continuity across sessions.

🤖 ML Recommendation System

Instead of basic filtering, we implemented multi-signal ranking:

[ Score = 3A + 1T + 1M + 2R ]

Where:

(A): Category Affinity
(T): Trust-aware boosting
(M): Mode relevance (rent/sell intent)
(R): Recency prioritization

This powers the “Picked for You” personalized feed.

🏫 Multi-Tenant Campus Isolation

Every college operates as its own ecosystem via collegeDomain scoping:

Isolated item feeds
Isolated trust scores
Isolated wanted boards
Isolated recovery systems

All from a single deployment, instantly scalable to 100+ campuses.

Challenges we ran into

This project pushed us through real engineering problems:

Designing real-time chat scoped strictly to transaction contexts
Preventing false claims in Lost & Found using verification flows
Building a full transaction lifecycle with disputes + accountability
Ensuring zero data leakage between campuses
Making trust behavioral and dynamic — not a gamed star rating

We weren’t just building features.

We were building infrastructure for trust.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Built a complete campus marketplace + lost recovery + wanted board in one system
Implemented trust scores that evolve from real user behavior
Delivered rich real-time chat without external messaging apps
Created instant claim queues to fairly distribute free items
Designed multi-tenant scaling across universities
Built something that feels less like a hackathon demo… and more like a startup-ready platform

What we learned

This hackathon taught us that:

Trust is the hardest and most important layer in marketplaces
Real-time systems demand careful event + state consistency
ML becomes meaningful only when paired with human reliability signals
The best products solve problems people live every day

Most importantly:

Communities don’t need more platforms.
They need systems they can trust.

What’s next for ShareNet

Our vision is for ShareNet to become the default sharing layer for universities.

Next steps:

📱 Mobile app rollout
🧠 Smarter ML models (collaborative filtering + graph-based trust)
🛡️ Campus moderation + admin dashboards
🌱 Sustainability analytics: money saved + waste reduced
🌍 Expansion to hundreds of colleges globally

Our mission is simple:

[ ShareMore + WasteLess = StrongerCampuses ]

Help campuses share more, spend less, and build stronger communities.

⚠️ Note for Judges

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