Communify | Devpost

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project stems from the lack of connectivity between residents of a city and the city itself. We believe that by making it easy for residents to interact with their city, we can all contribute to building more healthy and sustainable environments. While in Canada, most cities have commendable city services, it's sometimes difficult to know which services and departments can help with smaller issues. With Communify, our goal is to empower residents of every city to take small steps towards small change because compounding small changes is often what drives big change.

What it does

Communify connects residents directly with their city to address any issues or problems in their community. This could be anything from road safety issues near specific intersections, potholes, mismanaged amenities, broken sidewalks, etc. Oftentimes, these things are so small that they go unnoticed. People are unsure of who they should contact to resolve these small issues - that's where Communify comes in.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to help build our site and used VoiceFlow to create the chatbot function on our site. We also used Figma to create a vision of how our project may appear in the future if we were to develop our project further.

Challenges we ran into

As high school programmers, we don't have the most knowledge in the world which led to some difficulties when we dealt with the VoiceFlow chatbot. For instance, we were unsure of how we were supposed to use an API to help us search through a Google sheet to find a certain String or value. However, we overcame this challenge by using our knowledge of Google sheets and its function of =SEARCH() to help us with this problem.

Furthermore, considering our project is intended to be extremely user-friendly, we placed a lot of emphasis on making our website design clean and easy to navigate. This presented some challenges, as we had to ensure the information we placed on the page was general enough for any person from any city to understand, while also making sure we were getting our message across. We made sure we placed the Sign In buttons at the top of the page, where the user first looks. We also included lots of images and big words so seniors would have no trouble navigating the site.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For this project, we're really proud of being able to come up with a viable idea that has real world applications. We spent a lot of time ideating a strong idea that we knew would be of benefit to all of the residents and communities who used it. We also learned a lot from a technology standpoint. From being able to create an entire website and learn how voice flow worked to using Figma for planning our back end user experience, we were able to consider all aspects of usability , design, and technological limits to create a project.

What we learned

We learned how to use Voiceflow, which was a wonderful experience as we were able to clearly see the logic that a chatbot goes through before sending a response to the user. Furthermore, we gained a lot of experience from this Hackathon; learning how to manage our time, work as a team, and also how to build off of each others' ideas.

What's next for Communify

We hope to build and grow Community further beyond Hack the North. It's a great tool for cities to adapt to streamline their services and serve the residents of their communities in the best way possible. Our system is scalable as it allows cities to have their own city space that residents can join. We hope that we can learn and build more solutions on Communify including adding the option for residents to upload pictures and using AI to assign priority ratings in a less biased (more case-by-case) way. As users increase, we want to make the process as streamlined and easy as possible so people feel like they matter. As Communify grows and scales, we want to make our platform secure so it's only being used and adopted by legitimate residents and cities. To do this, we hope to build an authentication system for cities and allow residents to upload proof of their residence in the city as a prerequisite for joining a city space.

Business Viability

While Communify seems like a social project at first, there is tremendous potential for business through the platform. All cities want to be able to improve the quality of life of their residents. Doing it through a streamlined platform not only decreases costs but also greatly increases efficiency. To adopt Communify, we would charge the city a fixed initiation fee for onboarding on the platform and customization as well as a quoted per month cost based on the population of the city. This would encourage small cities to get on our platform and improve their cities.