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Inspiration
Our team was inspired by the NUS TalentConnect platform. Available to all undergraduate and alumni students, it enables one to view upcoming events and available internship positions, and to curate one's resume and individual profile to share with potential employers.
We wanted to create a similar platform that would enable companies to identify pressing social needs, brainstorm and consolidate their ideas in a single place, and source for suitable partners and participants that would improve the odds of successful social initiatives being conceived.
What it does
Our prototype allows visitors to view available projects and acquire details about particular projects of interest such as category, location, description, and organiser's email. They may also visit company profile pages that provide more info on their offered projects, fields of expertise, and past collaborations.
Visitors can register for projects they would like to contribute to at the bottom of the respective pages. Their particulars are saved into the website's in-built admin system, which stores information on all projects, participants, categories and locations currently hosted on the server. Prior admin authentication ensures that the security of this data is not compromised, while user authentication ensures that only registered members can sign up for projects.
Finally, the Collaborations page enables one to view shared projects between any two participants registered in Django's admin system. This is useful in enabling companies to keep track of all ongoing partnerships, identify companies with whom they share many common goals with, and even extend invitations to those they would not have noticed otherwise. Individual profile pages also enable visitors to learn more about a company's available projects, areas of business, and past collaborations.
How we built it
The entire website was built with the Django framework, supported by underlying HTML and CSS files. Data records are stored in a local SQL database.
Challenges we ran into
Development of the collaborations page and user authentication pages were especially difficult, requiring a strong grasp of Django concepts such as templates, model forms, and render requests. The Many-to-Many relationship linking participants to projects required very careful attributing to access correctly, and would not have been achieved without extensive debugging and browsing on stackoverflow forums and obscure YouTube tutorials.
This is especially so as for most of us, it was our first time working with Django, thus it was challenging to master these concepts within the one-week timeframe.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
It was deeply satisfying to have addressed all of the challenge statement's requirements, especially for the collaborations and user authentication pages which we consider to be the highlight features of our solution.
What we learned
Designing websites with a web framework, which while considerably more challenging than pre-built sites like Wix, is more than compensated for by its greater breadth and depth of functions and classes, and is easily maintained and scaled for production and deployment.
What's next for Global Connect Projects
We would have liked to add a category filter for projects for the user to explore projects within a specific field of interest, as well as include file uploads within each project details page. Moreover, the collaborations page can be improved considerably by allowing for more participants to be considered and visualising these relationships within a graph. Integration with third-party communication apps like Zoom and Microsoft Teams are also desirable, and will be explored should this project be expanded.
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