Beacon Board

🤝 Inspiration

As our communities around us only grow larger it is important to find ways to stay connected and unite under common purposes. Allowing people around us to stay up to date on community events and volunteer opportunities creates a stronger sense of belonging to all those around us and promote a healthier community through the collective effort of the volunteers and event coordinators in our communities.

✏️ What it does

Beacon Board is about rallying and uniting communities together. Through the Beacon Board website, the user can sign in and post events happening around their community as well as view them using the Google Maps API. They can filter their viewing page based on the type of event they are looking for and can use the map to navigate towards any events that pique their interest.

🔨 How we built it

Beacon Board is a web application that was built primarily using Next.js and TypeScript. In order to store scraped data from local community events, we used MongoDB Atlas. Additionally, Google Maps API was used in order to track and visualize the user's surrounding community engagement. The list of technologies used in or to build Beacon Board is:

Next.js
TypeScript
AUTH0
MongoDB
Google Maps/Places APIs

💡 Challenges we ran into

The data scraping portion was the project was arguably the most difficult part of creating Beacon Board. Most of the filtering categories work, but some of them fell short of what we were hoping to get out of this project.

💪 Accomplishments that we're proud of

A lot of the team was working with an unfamiliar language, which was a very high learning curve. We are proud of the way that we each independently worked on aspects of the code and were able to seamlessly connect all the parts with little to no issues.

🧠 What we learned

We learned a lot of things for this project! Firstly, you don't need to know the whole language of Typescript or how to fully use Next.JS to start coding something. Learning is a continual process, and learning as you go and about the topics relating to your project can help narrow in the learning process. Additionally, we learned what it's like to work on a team and how to collaborate with each other to make sure all of our code works together to make a cohesive project. Understanding each other's strengths and weaknesses allows us to help each other out and compensate for what others may still need help on.

🔦 What's next for Beacon Board

Beacon Board has a lot of room to grow as a product. While we are pleased with the end result, the project overall could be heavily refined, particularly with the events and scraped data. We created a general base for users to be able to add their own events, however it does not quite work the way we would like it to. With this "Add Event" system, users will be able to connect with their peers in more unique ways.