collective

NWHacks 2020

Inspiration

This project was inspired by one of the group member's grandmother and her friends. Each month, the grandmother and her friends each contribute $100 to a group donation, then discuss and decide where the money should be donated to. We found this to be a really interesting concept for those that aren't set on always donating to the same charity. As well, it is a unique way to spread awareness and promote charity in communities. We wanted to take this concept, and make it possible to join globally.

What it does

Each user is prompted to sign up for a monthly Stripe donation. The user can then either create a new "Collective" with a specific purpose, or join an existing one. Once in a collective, the user is able to add new charities to the poll, vote for a charity, or post comments to convince others on why their chosen charity needs the money the most.

How we built it

We used MongoDB as the database with Node.js + Express for the back-end, hosted on a Azure Linux Virtual Machine. We made the front-end a web app created with Vue. Finally, we used Pusher to implement real time updates to the poll as people vote.

Challenges we ran into

Setting up real-time polling proved to be a challenge. We wanted to allow the user to see updates to the poll without having to refresh their page. We needed to subscribe to only certain channels of notifications, depending on which collective the user is a member of. This real-time aspect required a fair bit of thought on race conditions for when to subscribe, as well as how to display the data in real time. In the end, we implemented the real-time poll as a pie graph, which resizes as people vote for charities.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team has competed in several hackathons now. Since this isn't our first time putting a project together in 24 hours, we wanted to try to create a polished product that could be used in the real world. In the end, we think we met this goal.

What we learned

Two of our team of three had never used Vue before, so it was an interesting framework to learn. As well, we learned how to manage our time and plan early, which saved us from having to scramble at the end.

What's next for Collective

We plan to continue developing Collective to support multiple subscriptions from the same person, and a single person entering multiple collectives.