After doing some research on Arc'teryx grant awardees, we were inspired how diverse each club was in terms of geographical location, purpose, activities, etc. We aim to bring each club closer by encouraging routine outdoor activities within clubs, while connecting different clubs worldwide.

We created this social networking app to bring Arc'teryx grant awardees from various locations and backgrounds together, while also allowing members within Arc'teryx community clubs to come together.

Arc'teryx community members given a club access code can create an account on our platform, Flock. Users post pictures of themselves outdoors (powered by image detection) and can share the image with members of their club or members worldwide. Users can choose to view the outdoor activities of different clubs worldwide and get inspired or interact with them.

We built the frontend using React Native and the backend using Python. We used Firebase services like firestore and storage to store our data, and we used Ngrok to host our backend.

The biggest challenge we ran into was getting React Native to work. We ran into many dependency arrows and we weren't used to the syntax.

Creating a fairly robust backend on Firebase that supports querying and adding different but related data. We also implemented our own base image detection model, which detects if the image the user uploads is detected to be outdoors or indoors. Ultimately, we're also proud of our app which included our custom designs.

We learned that React Native was a lot different than what we were expecting. It brought many challenges, but also insightful solutions.

There are a lot of improvements for Flock to make it a fully-fledged social app. We plan to support more forms of media like texts or videos, and features to comment or like posts. This should make the app more interactive. This app also provides a great opportunity for Arc'teryx to market to and support their passionate and diverse community.

run

• npm install
• npx expo start