HelpLah! [Team Ganbatte]

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  Wire Framing

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  High Fidelity Prototype

💡 Inspiration

We were inspired by the problem solving creativity seen during the ideation process in hackathons. However, most hackathons only target computing students, limiting participation from those from other fields.

Like how we brainstorm together during hackathons, we wanted to create a website for those who are not so technologically skilled but also have creativity and domain expertise to come up with ideas to help solve environmental and social issues. We want to open up the floor for everyone (regardless of their expertise) to put on their thinking caps and figure out new ways to make Singapore a better place.

With this website, we also hope that potential volunteers will find it easier to sieve out the volunteer opportunities that appeal to them, or that they think they can contribute to! We hope that it will be easier for welfare organisations to advertise for the positions they need on a consolidated platform.

🔍 What it does (and how does it answer the problem statement)

Our chosen theme is Giving Back. The question chosen was Question 1:Volunteering is one the best ways to give back to our community. What creative ideas do you have to make volunteering easier, widespread, and more beneficial to those in need?

• Primary
  • Generating new ideas for volunteering projects
    • To better utilise the available human brain power and creativity in a way where people do not need to commit to large, long-term intimidating projects (making it easier for people to contribute)
    • Open the floor for people with resources to pick up these ideas rather than individual groups struggling to come up with ideas on their own
  • Providing a platform for voluntary organisations to germinate (like the default services to start from scratch) and find the people they need to get started on actually working for their cause, something similar to NUS's own SIC but on a wider scale
  • Eg a quick way to find voluntary web developers, social media managers, finance managers and so on.
  • Allow for connections among people of similar philanthropic interests, to strengthen the volunteering community.
• Secondary
  • Providing a platform for people to quickly find relevant volunteer opportunities (eg computing students always looking for opportunities to grow their portfolio so its like mutually beneficial)
    • And see how their contributions have helped their community/cause

By analysing the data on the different openings and volunteer profiles, we can identify which skills are in the most demand, and which openings have been unfilled for the longest time. This can streamline the process of matching volunteers and organisations making volunteering easier and more widespread.

Furthermore by studying the volunteer interest and participation in aiding communities, we are able to gather smaller communities or organisations that need greater attention, and will spotlight them. In doing so, we want every organisation, every project, every community, to be able to achieve the outreach that they seek.

Use of NLP to generate new and whacky solutions

🔧 How we built it

First, we spent time ideating on Google Docs and listed all our ideas for each of the questions. We eventually decided on the theme, Giving Back. Our next step was to plan out the pages on Figma, which took surprisingly long to do. Finally, with the remaining time we had, we started coding out the website. Using Vanilla html, js and css, we made our website.

🏃‍♂️ Challenges we ran into

• It took us very long to decide the topic that we wanted to do
• Trying to make it as boomer friendly as possible 👍
• Figuring out how to use the NLP for this hack
• Figuring out what data we can use and how we can use it

🏅 Accomplishments that we're proud of

Made it boomer friendly, targeted at the elders as they have the most time and money, we want to make sure that they can help the community in their own way with their years of experience and expertise. Our intuitive design includes:

• Fonts - Large - Clear and readable font selected - Text is sufficiently space - Contrasted against the background - Use of Sans Serif fonts to make it boomer friendly
  • Buttons
    • Large and clearly labeled
  • Input fields
    • Contain hint texts and clear indication that they are input fields

We also managed to integrate the NLP functionality into the project. Easy for the boomers to use and learn.

🧠 What we learned

• We learnt more about the Cohere API :’)
  • It was interesting to see how their NLP model worked
  • We created the data used for NLP by coming up with possible questions and answers people might be interested in.
• Learned about accessibility on the web while looking up how to make our website more boomer friendly

⏭️ What's next for HelpLah!

• We plan to implement all the proposed pages on Figma, in html
• Some ideas for enhancing the website
  • Recommend volunteers some openings that are related to their previous volunteering experiences / skills
  • Stats on the most sought after skills (that are required by the welfare organisations)

Built With

• canva
• cohere
• css
• figma
• html
• javascript