HARAKA

Inspiration

The team came together with similar passion of making a difference in the life of a common person. There were different target groups in minds of each participant but after intensive brainstorming sessions we settled on a singular idea. The idea was to reach the actual individual who experiences a certain problem in their daily lives, but is unable to solve it due to their limitation. i.e. Zoya : An unheard farmer in africa having irrigation issues due to global warming having no idea how to solve it.

We were able to identify the gap between talented individuals, who would like to take on challenges to solve and give back to the society, and individuals like Zoya who can never reach such a talent pool or platform. This is how Haraka was formed.

What it does:

Haraka is a platform which provides an opportunity to anyone to post a problem as a challenge to a community of skilled individuals who form project based team to solve them.

So it works in three stages:

Individuals like Zoya posts their problems, which is voted but users on the platform and ranked according to number of votes. For convenience, we made a mechanism where users can vote by swiping right or left.
Then, top 10 challenges are selected and categorized according to tracks such as agriculture, healthcare, etc. Which are then available to Hackers who chose according to their interest and build teams with other hackers.
After coming up with MVP, or prototype, implementation will be conducted with help of local and international strategic partners such as NGOs.

How we built it

It is an integrated web based platform with a mobile app. We create an android app with android studio, and integrated it with an API with Sinatra framework.

Challenges we ran into

We had never developed an android app before, which made us run into a lot of challenges. Most of them were very difficult to overcome, but also made us learn a lot in the process.

Web vs Mobile – we had to decide on which platform to deploy our app, both having advantages and disadvantages. We focused our app on mobile, but also built a small website.

Github – As we haven’t used github before, it took us a while to get used to it. However, the distributed work environment is something we’re never letting go of!

Json url parsing: We were planning on using REST to communicate between the website and the mobile app. Parsing a json url proved difficult on a mobile app, and we decided to establish a cloud DB.

Databases: AWS, Firebase – we tried setting up a database in multiple environments. Because of clashes between dependencies, we were unable to integrate a DB for our app.

XML layouts: We used XML to create some basic layouts for our app. As none of us were familiar with CSS or XML, we had to learn on the go.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Create an android app for the first time, and try to connect it with the API we created. Tt is not complete at the end, but we proud we try hard to integrate it. Developed our own android prototype-app and played it on our phone. Used Github for the first time.

What we learned

It was a intensive experience as we got to learn alot of new things. Since we all knew difference languages it was quite interesting to find a suitable integration. Moreover, coding with Android was pretty challenging as new thing none of us were aware of it. We, especially were struggling with incompatibilities between libraries.