Covi-Help

Help in Delhi

Inspiration

I was driven by the crisis that is going on in India. As an Indian-American I have been personally affected by the crisis and watch in anger and helplessness as terror and death consumes India.

What it does

It crawls through twitter and filters out tweets asking for resources and scams, leaving only tweets that are giving resources. For now, we can only look for oxygen.

How we built it

I used the twint library for python in the backend. Then I joined our cleaned and filtered data in a Firestore database. For the frontend, I used React, and used the data from our database.

Challenges we ran into

Oh boy... The first challenge was learning to scrape Twitter. The company did not give us access to their API (this could be for many reasons, perhaps political). Learning an entirely new third party library was difficult. The next challenge was learning React -- I had literally never made a functioning React website before. Thanks to the internet, I was able to hack something together. (Credit to https://react.semantic-ui.com/)! Also, we had some deserters from our team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud that I was able to cobble something together on my first hackathon that is both meaningful and actually works.

What we learned

I learned some skills, namely React and Twint. I learned the sheet scale of the crisis in India. When I first queried Twitter, I found 100 promising results with phone numbers in them. 93 of those were requests. 93 desperate tweets begging for help to save their loved ones. There is almost no oxygen. This crisis will not disappear. Please donate, humanity needs you.

What's next for Covi-Help

We will add functionality to search for beds and medicine. More importantly, we will get the code to run on a cloud server so that we can take queries from the user. In this way, we will be able to make this service available to every city in India, not just Delhi. Jaipur, and Mumbai.