sociouts | Devpost

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Inspiration

Tired of indecisive planning? Scared to have your ideas shot down? Coordinate group plans with ease with interactive and collaborative selection! Join a group, select your area, and start swiping!

We are all too familiar with the indecisiveness that comes with organizing group hangouts– paralyzed by the fear of having our ideas shut down, we’re often reluctant to suggest our true yearnings. What we needed was a system to consider all ideas equally and anonymously. This led to the development of sociouts, an effortless, yet effective way to plan group outings outside the pressuring eye of public opinion.

What it does

sociouts is an anonymous, yet collaborative group outing planner, with custom filters on locations, distance and amenity type. During the voting process, the group will then pick "yes" or "no" for the ensuing suggestions, for which logistical details will be included to simplify the procedure. After the selection, sociouts will tally up the votes to provide the top destinations chosen as a collective.

How we built it

We used Node.js/Express.js for a simple server backend, and Next.js as our frontend. To store our data, we used MongoDB Atlas. For our destinations, we used the OpenStreetMap database to pull amenity information within the given radius.

Challenges we ran into

None of us had used this particular tech stack before, and had very little JavaScript experience before this hackathon. This led to many roadblocks and long hours of reading documentation and watching tutorials on the tech stack.

Our first thought was to use the Google Maps API for location querying, but after some research, we saw that it was locked behind a paywall, which pushed us to look for other solutions. This brought us to OpenStreetMap.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to learn a lot about the MERN stack, and we put together a final product with most of the functionality that we set out to implement. We have a working MongoDB database, and built a CRUD API to query it.

What we learned

The intricacies of different JS frameworks, and how our frontend made API calls to our backend, and in turn our database. Styling with Tailwind CSS.

What's next for sociouts

Completing the voting system, polishing up the UI and adding more features, such as the manual addition of destinations into the final list to be voted on.