Time Bank

Our hopes at Time Bank is to bring neighborhoods together, through rewarding good acts with time spent on them later. Give away furniture or serve your community to earn points today at Time Bank!

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Inspiration

Random acts of kindness are the most powerful tool to build communities and empower change.

Sadly an aspect of digital domain allows for toxic climates to build and push people from building connections like this.

At times the internet appears to provide more harm than good...

Although, you can change this. What if we could use our devices to promote positive community building in every neighborhood? What if every random act of kindness or frequent volunteering event was tracked in the digital domain? What if every random act we do for the world pushed others to return the reciprocity?

Imagine if we had a public banks for the hours we give to the world, and could trade these hours between one another?

What it does

Time Bank is an active effort to tackle this challenge of crowdsourcing volunteering and public donations. On Time Bank we build a community of localized posts consisting of furniture/chairs/food/other goods that members are looking to donate to the community. As well as post for acts of kindness, where people are looking for individuals to assist local community members with tasks around the house or their properties.

This is all built off the idea of reciprocity: In social psychology, reciprocity is the idea that people respond to positive actions with positive actions

Time Bank gives a platform you can gain points for the hours you give to the world or items that you donate. These points can be used to exchange for requested tasks around their house.

The idea is simple: If I give 2 hours through mowing Dave's yard, Dave gives two hours of gardening for Ginna's backyard, and Ginna drives my kids to school every day and it takes 2 hours. Then everyone was helped and has each devoted the same amount of time to the world!

It functions great for highschoolers looking to give back to the world and track the hours they volunteer. Which can be beneficial to students prepping for higher education or active in civil service.

How we built it

Time Bank is built from React Native, which enables the deployment on both iOS and Android. Firebase for our Database. Azure for storing images.

Elegant and simple.

Challenges we ran into

Frontend Development:

  • How to hack Firebase usage to stored images on without paying for the feature (by storing links instead of images)
  • Matt/Zach first time in React Native/Web Dev

AI integration:

  • YOLOv5 (pretrained): poor detections on turned TVs or damaged couches on small models.
  • Reward forecasting for donations: limited data for forecasting.

Things we Learn

Why use Firebase when Azure Blob Storage is very well suited for cloud image storage. React Native is a very powerful framework for mobile development. To second it's equally powerful for website devolvement that dynamically "reacts" to events on the page.

What's next for Time Bank

  • Build active user count
  • Build datasets for machine learning pipelines
  • Include non-profit organizations to post on the site
  • Create a donation tab (donation to the non-profit organization) to build funding
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