Alafia | Devpost

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Mosaic

Meet Alafia 🖼️

Alafia is the new way to connect with inspiring role models, leaders and creative works tailored to BIPOC users’ identities. Black communities are underrepresented in mainstream mentorship, media, and leadership, leaving many without culturally resonant role models, which is why we built Alafia. Through a generative AI-powered webapp, you can generate curated and bespoke Mosaics that:

📊 Integrate culturally relevant trends using multi-source APIs to ensure representation aligns with real-world data
📝 Deliver bespoke content through AI sentiment analysis and NLP, prioritizing accuracy and cultural resonance
💿 Recommend multimedia resources (films, books, music) to inspire users with actionable role models

Inspiration 🕊️

The Representation Gap

Black communities face systemic underrepresentation in leadership and media, with limited access to culturally resonant role models. We were inspired to name our app Alafia (derived from the Yoruba word for “peace”) because we believe that it embodies the belief that peace of mind stems from seeing oneself reflected in aspirations. Our team was driven by a simple truth: peace of mind comes from seeing yourself in your aspirations. Additionally, our logo is an Adinkra (symbols from Ghana that represent concepts or aphorisms) representing Unity, emphasizing the importance of togetherness, and how Alafia can bring you closer to others.

What is under Alafia's hood? 💻

Alafia is powered by:

Frontend: Next.js/React and Tailwind
Backend: Flask
APIs: Google Gemini for AI functions, Spotify, TheMovieDatabase (TMDB), and OpenLibrary for multi-media data

Never underestimate API authentication 🔒

Our biggest challenge this hackathon was handling API authentication. During our development, our API tokens frequently expired, making it difficult to maintain a valid local session. Constantly re-authenticating disturbed our workflows, and made it difficult to collaborate on our project.

Why we are proud of what we built 💼

While we were ambitious with our goals and planned features, our team was proud that we were able to prioritize our MVP instead of embellishing our project with unnecessary features. Focusing on a high fidelity MVP especially resonated with our group members as we believe in a KISS (Keep It Simple... Silly) approach. Throughout all of our development, we adhered to a well-maintained codebase (with intelligible commit messages) and high quality features, which enables us to also continue this project and drive impact even after the hackathon is over.

What we learned ⏰

Ideation is often the trickiest part for Hackathons. Personally, our team spent 7 hours (yes.., 7 hours) only discussing ideas which lead us back to a minor variation of our original plan. Our takeaway was that within the timeframe of a 24-hour hackathon, being more Agile should take precedence as we figured out our critical features by doing rather than planning...

Where Alafia is going! 🚌💨

Given the positive feedback surrounding Alafia, we are hoping to semi-permanently cloud-host an instance of Alafia so that we can continue to leave an impact after this hackathon!