FindMine

Inspiration

The inspiration from our project stems from the need to further the accessibility and inclusivity of the live music industry. Having been to a concert with a crippled friend (post skiing industry), we had first hand exposure to how a live music experience can be adversely affected by concert venues having improper or subpar accessibility features. We gained further inspiration by reading case studies on the internet, where people were unable to access concert venues or get refunds for an inaccessible venue

What it does

Our platform combines all of the live music venues in Melbourne into a centralised database where users can view the accessibility reviews of a given venue. Have a venue in mind? See what people have said in terms of wheelchair accessibility, blind-person friendly, etc. User's can also search for their favourite venues to see what information we have regarding them.

A spontaneous night adventure? Instead of having the burden of planning, users with accessibility considerations can use our platform to see what venues near them can meet their requirements.

How we built it

While the we began by using Flask to build the backend, we switched to only using nextJS as it bundles everything together for us, we ran a separate node API on a test vercel server in order to serve helper functions for the chrome extension.

Our website utilises javascript libraries like clerk, leaflet, and framer to handle authentication, mapbox rendering, and some cool animations. We used typescript to maintain a better codebase.

Challenges we ran into

As we began using Flask in an attempt to play to our members' strengths, we soon realised that the technicalities of trying to connect mongodb, clerk, and flask to work together culminated in messy code, bad security practices, and headaches for a team who were hackathon virgins by majority. This means that we were all challenged to use languages we weren't comfortable with (or in most cases hadn't used at all) such as typescript, as well as foreign frameworks like next.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

By hackathon's end, our team can say that we are proud to present a real-world solution to a real-world problem. By following a humanitarian route, we can all feel rewarded with our contribution to a more accessible, inclusive, music industry.

What we learned

All of our members learned something, whether that was how to make an API request, to using auth libraries, to making chrome extensions. I think the most profound lesson was how each technology can intertwine with one another to optimise an app's performance. Sometimes the most comfortable route is not always the best. This was certainly the case for us.

What's next for FindMine

The beauty of our solution is the scalability. We have the potential and motivation to scale to a fully functional web app, mobile app, and chrome extension. Beyond these technical progressions, our userbase can go global, since we primarily run on user data, global users can submit to us to have locations near them added.