Inspiration
Prefect was built with the consideration of Shubham's University location in Merced. Merced is in the central valley of California and is near many large state and federal prisons with many exiting convicts relocating to the area around it. Crimes are disproportionately high in this sparsely populated area as well as high unemployment especially to former felons. We believe that education is the best way to reduce poverty and crime and wanted to build a tool that would assist in lowering recidivism rates in the United States. We decided that providing parolees with a direct connection to employers as well as providing employers with the best information about parolees would hasten the hiring process and thus lowering crime in the United States.
What it does
The product is split into three parts, one a very rudimentary platform for prisons to enter parolee inmates participating in the platform. The second part is a education and job search tool for parolees. This part of our project is the most complete and includes prebuilt interactive courses for our parolees to take. These courses will be used to generate a profile that can be searched for by companies (the third portion of our platform).
How I built it
Node, lots of node.
Challenges I ran into
The project was perhaps too large for our group to handle during a hackathon. We instead decided to focus on the learning aspect and the experience/job placement algorithm on the parolee side and restrict ourselves from focusing too much on the employer side vs end user.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Completing the project to the best of our abilities in a fulfilling manner. Creating an idea in code that can legitimately create large social impact. Staying up to code vs sleeping to better humanity.
What I learned
As a group we learned how to work more effectively as a team, how to divide tasks to finish software development faster, and we improved our skills in Node.js, HTML5, and CSS.
What's next for Prefect
Hopefully Prefect will develop in a large way to an extent where we successfully implement ourselves into a prison system. We intend on attempting to start near Shubham's university and continue from there. We are also looking for support from anyone who has the ability to create an impact in the development, progression, or funding of this project.
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