Inspiration
To be honest, the "minors" on our team wanted an app that would allow them to determine which bars card, so they could avoid those and go to the ones that don't. But then we realized- if we flip this problem around, there's a tremendous opportunity for us to use this same principle to affect real change, and have a tangible social impact. It's near impossible for police officers to effectively patrol alcohol distribution to minors, and hiring agents to pose as minors can be extremely costly. But we, as a crowd, can solve this problem. We can help bring the number of young people that die every year from underage drinking from 5,000 to zero. By crowdsourcing this data collection, and incentivizing people to participate in the process, we can put together the dataset that we so desperately need-- one which tells us which establishments are upholding the law when it comes to serving minors, and which ones aren't. And once we have that information, we can create better policy, think critically about which businesses we support, and bring an end to this problem.
What it does
Three steps: 1) You go to a bar. You open up the app, and a yes or no question pops up. Did you get carded, or not? Your response becomes a datapoint in our growing crowdsourced database. 2) We display the percentage of people who have gotten carded at this establishment. Based on this outcome, you, as a consumer, can inform your decisions about which establishments you choose to support. Communities can hold bars and restaurants responsible for upholding the law, and boycott those that do not. 3) You receive a coupon code as a reward for your contribution. Use this by the end of the night for 10% off of your drinks!
How we built it
We used the following technologies to build our webapp: JavaScript, JQuery, HTML5, and CSS3. We depended on the Yelp API to provide us information about which bar we're currently standing in, and experimented with FireBase for our database (we ended up building our own data structure instead, since we felt it would meet our needs more efficiently).
Challenges we ran into
Turns out that Github won't allow for oauth. We needed to upload to a different server in order to get the location services to work. Also, FireBase ended up not meeting our needs in the way that we had hoped, so as we mentioned above, we decided to opt for a homegrown data structure instead. Lastly, given more time, we would have loved to dedicate more time to data analysis and data visualization capacities. We felt strongly that this would be the most powerful element of the application, but time didn't allow for us to pursue these capacities.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were extremely successful in our use of GitHub to effectively collaborate and exercise version control. Also, we successfully integrated Yelp, which was an exciting accomplishment after we struggled with the API for a long time. Finally, we were really happy with the pain point we identified, and the solution we identified. It successfully integrated our interests and strengths, and allowed us to develop skills we were excited about.
What we learned
Our process was heavily pitch-driven, which was a new way for us to develop. We began the process by creating and practicing our pitch, and came back to that pitch periodically over the course of the hackathon to make sure that we were developing the features that we had initially envisioned. Approaching our development process in this way allowed us to focus, and to exercise vision and effective goal setting.
What's next for CardMe
Capacity for data analysis. So far, we've developed the user-facing side of the app. We're excited to build the capacity for policy makers and law enforcement officers to extract datasets from the app, and perform analyses on trends and patterns which they observe in the dataset.
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