GatORGanizer

Disclaimer The submitted product does not reflect the following description. This description is what the project would ideally become given more time to work on it. We have separate components working like fetching posts with the Instagram API and a custom AI that successfully processes text from captions as well as the html frontend for the website, but we were unfortunately unable to combine all features so the calendar is not being populated with events from the dataset we have and pictures are not being displayed, but we do have access to image url data for them.

Inspiration

The existing student organization finder through GatorConnect is bland and outdated. Additionally, having to seek out and constantly check the social media of each of your orgs to keep up with what events they have planned can get tedious. We wanted to create a more exciting, engaging, and practical way to find new organizations and keep track of what is going on in the organizations you are already involved in.

What it does

The GatORGanizer is a one-stop shop for everything org-related here at UF. The scrolling discovery page gives users a way to see what orgs on campus have been posting about recently and provides users an easy way to add orgs they are interested in to their calendar. This calendar, which can be customized to contain all the orgs the user is interested in, displays all upcoming and recent events along with key information like date, time, location, and a small description. The site also has a search section where users can look for orgs they are interested in learning more about and find recent pictures taken by the org as well as a summary of what the org does. Lastly, users can log in and make an account to save their org preferences for easier use the next time they log back in.

The GatORGanizer combines the features of an org discovery site with an auto-updating calendar to keep all of your important org-related content in one place.

The inner workings

All student organization data is gathered through Instagram!! Recent posts from general student orgs as well as all the orgs the user favorties are fetched using the Instaloader API and their captions are processed by our custom caption reading AI powered by OpenAI. Our AI can determine if the post is announcing an event, simply promoting the org, or warning about some upcoming deadline. It handles these unique situations by only storing relevant data like the date and location from an event post that needs to go in the calendar or cool pictures from a promotional post that could be displayed on the discovery feed.

AI impact

Because of our use of a custom AI text interpreter, our data gathering method works regardless of how orgs elect to format their Instagram posts. So, orgs that opt in to our site by sending us their username don't have to change a thing about how they run their page. As long as they post about an upcoming event with a descriptive caption, it will appear as a calendar item on the GatORGanizer site for students to see.

What's next for GatORGanizer

Expanding and optimizing are our two big goals. We would love to get as many campus organizations involved as possible. All we need is an Instagram username, so we hope that orgs will see the potential for convenient student outreach and contact us about connecting their page to GatORGanizer. Given the potential for substantial growth in both users and cooperating student orgs, we will also work to optimize GatORGanizer to ensure a pleasant user experience.

Built With

• flask
• html
• instaloader
• javascript
• openai
• python