S4 | Devpost

start screen
login into s4
submit a critic form
select a category
anonymous submission
Officials Dashboard - Create new Place
Officials Dashboard - Opinions Overview

Inspiration

Public safety is an important matter. But more often, people are too afraid/lazy to say something. We were searching for an easy way to let people improve their cities.

What we came up with

S4 (See Something, Say Something) is a website which makes posting issues easier. After shortly logging in, you can report crimes or general issues. The goal was to create a process of just a few clicks to get officials attention. The minimum requirement is providing a category from a dropdown list. With the timestamp and the location of the user, S4 creates a powerful map for officials to see problematic districts as well as good going ones. Our App isn't only about reporting what went wrong, it's a tool for residents to have a voice, to communicate what they like and what not. To make the app biliteral, officials have the possibility to create QR-Codes for places they want to get opinions about. When a user scans the code, he/she can say if they like it or not. With only one click.

For the officials, we build a dashboard that provides a map where all the opinions a user added can be seen. This gives a quick view of every opinion and hotspots as well as detailed information where opinions have been submitted and even there descriptions.

How we built it

The user's website is built with vue. The component for reporting a crime and a critic is the same. For the QR-Code form, we need to fetch information from the database first and only store a boolean(like it/not like it) value [+meta information of course]. In the background, an Amazon DynamoDB is storing all the data.

Challenges we ran into

getting the users geolocation only works on https. Fine for developing on localhost, difficult for testing on mobile. Solution: Amazon S3 Bucket
- AWS was really complex to understand in a short time. We tried to use AWS Lambda as well, but because we didn't need it for heavy calculations we did everything on the browser side.