LinkUP!

A web app for social advocacy, safety, and community.

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Inspiration

We wanted to create a platform to connect people attending protests. Attending protests alone can feel unsafe, but it is very important to support and work for social change in light of recent events in today's day and age. As a result, we created LinkUP!, which enables users to find and connect with groups to attend protests with.

What it does

LinkUP creates a platform for people to find groups to attend protests with. Users can create profiles or groups, and can see others' groups and contact their group creator. This encourages safety while users utilize their voice in support of social movements, as well as build their own communities of like-minded people striving for social change.

How I built it

We built LinkUP! on top of this template: https://ics-software-engineering.github.io/meteor-application-template-react/. We then extensively edited the template to craft it into the desired website. Our code was almost entirely in JavaScript and the rendering library we used was React. For maps, we used the Maps JavaScript API. Our design images were built with Figma.

Challenges I ran into

We had originally hoped to make it possible to join groups inside LinkUP!, with each group's creator being able to vet requests to join the group from other users. Unfortunately, we could not find an approach to successfully implement this in the timeframe. None of our team members had much experience with using Semantic UI React, so we found it very difficult to implement our original UI/UX design onto the website in 24 hours.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were proud to have created a website with appealing visuals and a reliable system that helps connect advocates for social change and facilitate a stronger community for safe protesting. This provides just one further avenue helping people bring about social change in the society of Washington, America, and beyond.

What I learned

We learned that it's very important to tackle the most complicated or difficult features of our project early on, especially in a hackathon. In particular, we attempted to make it possible to join groups inside LinkUP! later in the development process and were not successful in doing so. It may have been possible had we begun earlier and devoted more resources to this challenging task, even if it had seemed a bit out of order. Likewise, if we had realized this was not possible within 24 hours early on, this could have altered the trajectory of LinkUP! significantly.

What's next for LinkUP!

The next step for LinkUP! is to make it possible to join separate groups within LinkUP! and for the creator of those groups to approve or deny the requests of others to join the mega group that was created. This would allow LinkUP! users to join groups, coordinate locations, and thus set up protests completely internally, without having one's contact information made public to other users. From there, we would like to create recommendations for where a group should meet by finding parks, malls, or cafes near the geographic average of all of the users within that group. We would also like to only display users for groups that one is in to protect user privacy, which is possible now that we have the information of the users in each particular group. We would also like to implement a chat box feature in the group pages, where members of the group can improve communication among each other.

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