In The Art

In The Art is an art community whose mission is to provide creatives from minority backgrounds the opportunity to engage in community-centered art events.

Comment 4

Inspiration

We created In the Art because of the lack of easily accessible art education/programs in minority communities, as well as the need for community among creatives who have minority backgrounds.

What it does

In the Art gives back to minority communities by giving these creatives opportunities to engage in community-centered events in visual and performing arts at no cost. Events can be registered on our website for site members who are interested to RSVP and attend. We also have opportunities to volunteer at these events as event facilitators and drivers, as well as calls for sponsors to ensure that attendees are paying little or nothing to participate in our events.

How we built it

Our website was created using the Velo by Wix tool from MLH. We found a template for a Community Center website, customized our Home, Support Us, and Forum pages, and added an Events and a Create an Event page. We made use of Wix Forms for event creators to provide information on their events. We also added a Search bar for easy site navigation and a Member Chat feature for conversations between site members.

Challenges we ran into

We had a backend component of our web application using MongoDB and Python. However, we were unable to figure out how to connect our Wix site to the backend for things like automatically adding an event on the site, or user authentication. We did some research on developing an API for our database (to allow for the frontend to connect to the backend via HTTP requests) and using an adapter.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to develop and publish a community-centered website using the resources given to us. Also, even though we couldn’t incorporate the backend into our site, we still learned how to use MongoDB Atlas as a database.

What we learned

During the ideation of the project, we learned how useful it is to breakdown the project into smaller tasks for each of us to contribute to. We made sure to spend time brainstorming possible ideas that we could develop, and we utilized a Google Jamboard to visualize how we wanted our website to look. Additionally, we learned on how to use Velo by Wix for developing the full site, which saved us time rather than building the site from scratch.

What's next for In the Art

Due to time and technical constraints, we were unable to incorporate all of our ideas into the submitted project. We acquired a domain name but are yet to connect it to our site, as well as add these features:

  • Event Categories: Events will be displayed according to what category they fall under for easier navigation, and tags will be added to them. Prospective categories/tags include Art, Music, Theater, and Dance.
  • Event-specific Group Chats: Besides the already existing sitewide forums, we plan to add event-specific group chats through which attendees can receive event updates and communicate with each other.
  • Event Creator Photo Identification: We plan to incorporate photo ID verification for event creators prior to publishing their events on our sites for added event security.
  • Once these are implemented, we will republish our website under its own domain name and move forward from there.
Share this project:

Updates