Ask4Angela

Ask4Angela

Inspiration

Going out with friends or for a date should always be easy and fun, but sadly, the reality is it's not. The Ask For Angela campaign was first started in England in in 2016, with the intention of keeping people safe from sexual assault/harassment by helping them get out of uncomfortable situations at bars or restaurants.

Today, the web and technology are an intricate part of our lives, making it an easily accessible tool for communication. We see this as an opportunity to digitalise the "Ask For Angela" scheme, allowing people to get help literally within the reach of their fingertips.

What it does

As with "Ask For Angela", our website Ask4Angela will help users discretely ask restaurant/bar staff for help to get out of an uncomfortable situation.

Users can enter the website, indicate (1) the restaurant/bar venue they are at, (2) their current table number, and (3) preference on how to resolve this predicament; the user is then provided with a keyword (eg. Wonderful) they can easily work into a conversation for them to use when the staff comes to help.

The staff will receive an Ask4Angela notification with the user's request. They will locate the table number provided and ask a question (eg. How's the food?) to identify the user-in-need with the keyword provided. Appropriate response and actions will then be taken by the staff to resolve this.

How we built it

We built our website in HTML, CSS and Javascript, with the help of React to build structures & elements. We divided the workload by assigning each of us to work on different webpages within the website that the users/restaurants will access.

Challenges we ran into

This is the first time we are doing web development, so one of the biggest challenges we faced was connecting the scripts with each other to establish functionality. To overcome this, Googling certainly helped, but it was through our discussions with one another, and troubleshooting coding bugs together that helped bring it all together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our proudest achievement is brainstorming this meaningful and amazing idea and being able to transform it into reality as as a website that is ** functional ** in under 24 hours.

What we learned

We learnt how to code a website in HTML, CSS & Javascript, as well as utilising React to aid our programming build. We also learnt how to communicate efficiently within a group project such as this hackathon, where time is of the essence to resolve issues and reach milestones.

What's next for Ask4Angela

For our next steps, we hope to add the user registration into our system such that users can also upload their picture as an extra form of identification. We also hope to add a rating system for the user to rate the restaurant/bar's response to their request, like how you rate your Uber drivers, which will further encourage restaurant/bars to do their best to help customers out of these uncomfortable situations.