Change Up! | Devpost

Inspiration

For many of us social issues have been top of mind in the past few years. However, the method in which social media and mainstream media alerts us to these issues and their events are often through flashy, attention grabbing headlines that prey on our emotions and blind us to the founding principles and nuances of each movement. With the explosion in popularity of the subreddit r/antiwork we thought now would be a fantastic time to create an application that allows users to easily organize or join local movements for particular causes where their important information and foundational ideas are prominently on display. This idea attempts to combat the radicalization and increased society division that occurs when movements grow rapidly through the aforementioned ways. Through changeup we hope to provide a pathway for users to meetup and make change in ways that stay true to the founding principles and grow in healthy, productive ways.

What it does

Change Up allows for an easy way for people to come together and mobilize without having to dig around for information. With the simplistic UI in combination with the local events page, people can stay up to date with social issues that have an immediate effect on them.

How we built it

Used flutter to create the UI and app pages. Used firebase for user authentication in combination with cloud fire-store for event logging.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges we ran into
Getting flutter to mesh with the database
Learning Flutter and Dart
Lack of experience with advanced UI design
Member on team is new to coding and hackathons
- Finding meaningful ways for them to contribute
- Balancing productivity with teaching them
Moral implications of the concept and complexities of social change
- How we feel about the potential for the app to give further voice to movements that spread hate or disinformation
- Susceptibility of the app to bad faith actors or bots
- Union drives often require a level of subtle/ secrecy. Will the app provide companies with an easy way to squash union activities.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having a aesthetically pleasing finished product and a UI we can be proud of
Learning flutter and dart
Participating in a hackathon for the first time (one member)
The extent to which our idea forced us to consider the moral implications of tech

What we learned

Hackathons are definitely more enjoyable and valuable with a more advanced level of coding experience
Mobile development with flutter and dart
Interaction of dart and google firebase