## Why We Created **Here**

As college students, one question that we catch ourselves asking over and over again is – “Where are you studying today?” One of the most popular ways for students to coordinate is through texting. But messaging people individually can be time consuming and awkward for both the inviter and the invitee—reaching out can be scary, but turning down an invitation can be simply impolite. Similarly, group chats are designed to be a channel of communication, and as a result, a message about studying at a cafe two hours from now could easily be drowned out by other discussions or met with an awkward silence.

Just as Instagram simplified casual photo sharing from tedious group-chatting through stories, we aim to simplify casual event coordination. Imagine being able to efficiently notify anyone from your closest friends to lecture buddies about what you’re doing—on your own schedule.

Fundamentally, **Here** is an app that enables you to quickly notify either custom groups or general lists of friends of where you will be, what you will be doing, and how long you will be there for. These events can be anything from an open-invite work session at Bass Library to a casual dining hall lunch with your philosophy professor. It’s the perfect dynamic social calendar to fit your lifestyle.

Groups are customizable, allowing you to organize your many distinct social groups. These may be your housemates, Friday board-game night group, fellow computer science majors, or even a mixture of them all. Rather than having exclusive group chat plans, **Here** allows for more flexibility to combine your various social spheres, casually and conveniently forming and strengthening connections.

## What it does

**Here** facilitates low-stakes event invites between users who can send their location to specific groups of friends or a general list of everyone they know. Similar to how Instagram lowered the pressure involved in photo sharing, **Here** makes location and event sharing casual and convenient.

## How we built it

UI/UX Design: Developed high fidelity mockups on Figma to follow a minimal and efficient design system. Thought through user flows and spoke with other students to better understand needed functionality.

Frontend: Our app is built on React Native and Expo.

Backend: We created a database schema and set up in Google Firebase. Our backend is built on Express.js.

All team members contributed code!

## Challenges

Our team consists of half first years and half sophomores. Additionally, the majority of us have never developed a mobile app or used these frameworks. As a result, the learning curve was steep, but eventually everyone became comfortable with their specialties and contributed significant work that led to the development of a functional app from scratch.

Our idea also addresses a simple problem which can conversely be one of the most difficult to solve. We needed to spend a significant amount of time understanding why this problem has not been fully addressed with our current technology and how to uniquely position **Here** to have real change.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of how developed our app is currently, with a fully working database and custom frontend that we saw transformed from just Figma mockups to an interactive app. It was also eye opening to be able to speak with other students about our app and understand what direction this app can go into.

## What we learned

Creating a mobile app from scratch—from designing it to getting it pitch ready in 36 hours—forced all of us to accelerate our coding skills and learn to coordinate together on different parts of the app (whether that is dealing with merge conflicts or creating a system to most efficiently use each other’s strengths).

## What's next for **Here**

One of **Here’s** greatest strengths is the universality of its usage. After helping connect students with students, **Here** can then be turned towards universities to form a direct channel with their students. **Here** can provide educational institutions with the tools to foster intimate relations that spring from small, casual events. In a poll of more than sixty university students across the country, most students rarely checked their campus events pages, instead planning their calendars in accordance with what their friends are up to. With **Here**, universities will be able to more directly plug into those smaller social calendars to generate greater visibility over their own events and curate notifications more effectively for the students they want to target. Looking at the wider timeline, **Here** is perfectly placed at the revival of small-scale interactions after two years of meticulously planned agendas, allowing friends who have not seen each other in a while casually, conveniently reconnect.

The whole team plans to continue to build and develop this app. We have become dedicated to the idea over these last 36 hours and are determined to see just how far we can take **Here**!
## Inspiration

As University of Waterloo students who are constantly moving in and out of many locations, as well as constantly changing roommates, there are many times when we discovered friction or difficulty in communicating with each other to get stuff done around the house.

## What it does

Our platform allows roommates to quickly schedule and assign chores, as well as provide a messageboard for common things.

## How we built it

Our solution is built on ruby-on-rails, meant to be a quick simple solution.

## Challenges we ran into

The time constraint made it hard to develop all the features we wanted, so we had to reduce scope on many sections and provide a limited feature-set.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We thought that we did a great job on the design, delivering a modern and clean look.

## What we learned

Prioritize features beforehand, and stick to features that would be useful to as many people as possible. So, instead of overloading features that may not be that useful, we should focus on delivering the core features and make them as easy as possible.

## What's next for LiveTogether

Finish the features we set out to accomplish, and finish theming the pages that we did not have time to concentrate on. We will be using LiveTogether with our roommates, and are hoping to get some real use out of it!
## Inspiration

The inspiration of this application stemmed from a discord video call, where the phrase “turn on your cameras, this is the only way we can see each other” changed from just a sentence into an idea.

We wanted to create an app specifically created by and for university students, to create a virtually social environment that could aid in reigniting connection, excitement, and the feeling of taking new chances.

## What it does

* Connects university/college students in a 1-on-1 format or in a group environment
	+ Integrates a video calling feature, allowing for the exchange of contact information and the ability to quickly make friends
	+ Also allows for text messaging and video calling using an avatar in consideration for users’ privacy concerns
* Helps students interact and meet other students around the world, or in their own community
	+ Includes features such as searching for a friend in a specific program or year
	+ Features other channels created for different purposes such as studying together, chilling, playing games, networking, working out, and more
* Helps maintain social activity and prevents COVID from affecting people's mental health

## How we built it

CampusCloud was built using Flutter and Dart.

## Challenges we ran into

* Although we had many ambitious ideas that would have added to the experience of using our app, time was a big constraint as we had to learn to prioritize the most important features
* Implementing certain features proved to be a problem, so once again we had to learn to prioritize certain features and details

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

* We came up with a great Idea that can help a lot of students, including ourselves
* We actively communicated and gave constructive feedback as a team, allowing for a realistic but enterprising product
* We were able to make a stellar, straightforward, and resourceful UI

## What we learned

* How to use different tools/browsers for UI/UX design applications & prototyping
	+ Specifically, we learned how to make full use of flutter's imports and how to use an emulator to fully test out program

## What's next for CampusCloud

* We want to be able to implement the other features/channels we couldn’t add this hackathon, including:
	+ Study, Games, Chill, Workout, Music channels
	+ Establishing a secure way to verify that users are students
	+ Allowing users to share socials with a click of button
	+ Creating a globe feature which allows students to see which countries they have virtually visited
	+ Provide a history list of people they have spoken to