A collaborative platform for exploring street events and performances.
The app was invented and developed as a project at the HackUPC Fall 2017 hackathon. We won the following prize:
- ThoughtWorks - Open Source Your City, 2nd place
Before the hackathon, while exploring the beautiful streets of sunny Barcelona, our team was fortunate to stumble upon a number of impressive street performers, from musicians of various exotic instruments to amazing aerobic shows. Coming from smaller and relatively less-exciting cities, the vibrant street life proved to be a huge addition to the overall experience of our journey. We were actually surprised that there was no apparent way to see and locate performances of interest - this lead to...
Crowdio is a collaborative platform for exploring interesting street events across the local city. It enables users to view their nearby area for events based on the category that may be of interest, as well as add new performances whenever an interesting performer is stumbled upon. The app is something that we wished we had as seeing more once-in-a-lifetime performances would have our trip to Barcelona that much more exciting.
Crowdio is beneficial for both: performers, as they get an opportunity to attract more observers and popularity to their shows, and everyday spectators/tourists who may be looking for shows, or who may just be passing by.
Crowdie was built primarily for Android, with a light Flask back-end to hold the state, and Firebase Cloud Messages for pushing notifications about events nearby, plus AWS and Google Maps.
Having limited Android experience was the primary challenge (only a single person with previous experience), however, our team was open to getting our hands dirty with a new technology.
We're happy to have a working prototype that can realistically be used in the city right now, and we are happy that each team member made a substantial contribution to the codebase.
We learned a lot about the Android development process, as well as Flask application deployment and AWS security groups.
Polish up the functionality, add some nice Facebook integration for tracking seen events and add more customisation options in terms of performance categories, notification range and profiles.