Act Greener

Take action from your office desk for a greener future and reduce your carbon footprint by tracking your progress along the way

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NOTE: The email and password to the Power Apps and the tenant is shared in the last slide of the presentation attached in the judge's section of the submission - video transcript is attached

Inspiration

We wanted to tackle climate change starting from the workplace. Why workplace? 1/3 of our time is spent on the workplace or WFH now, so we need to commit and stand up to the cause and put our programming skills to good use and make a positive dent in the combat of climate change.

What it does

This app helps in cultivating a sustainability habit for the greater good and making small yet effective changes in their workplace and their lifestyle. With Act Greener, users will learn what common and achievable actions they can take to reduce their carbon footprint, track carbon saved, earn badges, and encourage friendly competition with other associates and teams within their company. Yearly goals are set and can be updated to suit the team's phase, a polar bear sticker is available to indicate the status of the yearly goal, it gets sad and angry if your team is not performing well. Users can log their daily sustainable actions and track their progress, view their achievements and their team progress on their team dashboard view. There is an admin page that can be used to monitor the performance of teams and individuals.

How we built it

We are leveraging Power Platform and especially Power Apps to the maximum and storing data in SharePoint Lists, why Power Apps? Easy to integrate with Microsoft Teams and agile enough to add or update features as required and it comes with Office 365 so the customer doesn't have to buy anything new to use this app. We leverage it for orchestrating the flow between components. We've always been a fan of using low-code solutions just because of their simplicity and it has connectors to almost everything that you need to connect so it makes sense. Why reinvent the wheel? And we have been building on Power Platform for over two years now so have a good understanding of things here.

Azure Services Used

  • Power Apps – as a user interface
  • Power Automate – as a connector for different integrations
  • SharePoint List – as a database to store the Actions List, Action Logs, and members details
  • Azure Functions – as a backend service for generating graphs, and doing audit work
  • Azure Blob Storage – as an object store for generated graphs
  • Microsoft Teams – as a primary interface for end consumer
  • Microsoft Outlook – as a way to send reports, welcome note and graphs

Challenges we ran into

  • Initial struggle with sorting and aggregation of CO2 levels but docs threw a lifeline - love the clear and precise documentation
  • Dynamic image loading and leaderboard
  • Toggle for High-Contrast view

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Fixed all accessibility issues and performance issues detected by Power Apps checker
  • Successfully able to setup an Azure Function HTTP trigger which can call The Green Web Foundation APIs and gather data about the website
  • Created a timer trigger to generate a graph based on user action logs and upload it to Blob Storage
  • Understanding and adding a High Contrast Theme to the app
  • Admin Page for maintenance work

What we learned

  • How important is it to build apps with inclusive design - don't just see from your vision but look around
  • Having gone through pages of NASA and UNs pages to understand the impact of climate change is so frightening.
  • How always building for the community gives you a satisfaction

What's next for Act Greener

  • Satisfy 100% of inclusive design and submit the app to the Microsoft AppSource marketplace
  • Quarterly knowledge check for people in the Act Greener Community
  • Have live updates and statuses from NASA, UN, and WHO in the app to keep them updated on activities happening
  • Have a support page where users can ask questions, better understand the app, and provide valuable feedback
  • Implement more High Contrast Themes

Built With

  • azure-functions
  • matplotlib
  • pandas
  • power-apps
  • power-automate
  • python
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