Inspiration
I thought about how I could use the available City of Los Angeles data, and come up with a solution that is useful and engaging. I came up with the idea of finding available shelters, using the shelter dataset, and giving shelter staff the ability to update the number of available beds as people come in and out.
What it does
SafeSleep lets any LGBTQ homeless person find a shelter. The shelter staff update the number of vacant beds as people come and go, and this allows anyone to go to the site, and find vacancies for the night. This will prevent the homeless from travelling to a shelter, only to find it is full. The staff can also indicate whether the shelter is LGBTQ friendly at any given time, or if there is a suspected conflict such as an intolerant guest, the staff can uncheck the LGBTQ-friendly status to let people know that it might be a good idea to look elsewhere tonight.
How I built it
I spent about a week of my spare time building out the MVP. Technologies used include MEAN stack and some other helpers.
Challenges I ran into
How do we prevent abuse of the system? At first, it was going to be a crowd-sourced map, but that was ripe for abuse. I decided to give the power to the administrators of the shelters instead, as they can be more trusted to input accurate, unbiased, and respectful information.
What's next for SafeSleep
There's tons of possibilities. Maybe have some kind of IoT sensor as people come in and out so that the vacant bed count is updated automatically.
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