The world is oftentimes not a safe space for queer individuals. Finding pockets of community and comfort is therefore vital for survival and success. CitySpace provides a technology that lists LGBTQ+ friendly cities based on user reviews and data extracted from the Human Rights Campaign's (HRC) Municipal Equality Index (MEI).
We want to help not only individual members of the queer community to live in LGBTQ+ friendly spaces but also to provide guidelines for local and state governments to use towards building policy for inclusive cities.
- We used React for building the website itself, and used Firebase Cloud Firestore in order to store, access, and add to the reviews.
- Python allowed us to scan, extract, and store necessary information from the HRC MEI Database. Additionally, CitySpace can process an unlimited number of HRC MEI's pdfs, so the product can easily be expanded during future development.
- The HRC provided data through individual, highly stylized pdfs, making text extraction a substantially time consuming problem.
- This was our first time using Firebase, so we needed to learn while implementing the DB at the same time.
- Everyone’s experience with each city is bound to be different, so we added a robust review system for anyone and everyone to share their thoughts.
- We made sure to add alt values to every image so that our website will be accessible to everyone.
- The website's font and color are soft on the eyes and easily readable.
- As the scope of the website increases when users leave reviews for an increasing number of cities, adding a search bar would ease navigation and enhance the user experience.
We extracted our data from the 2020 Municipal Equality Index
https://cityspace.netlify.app/
We won 1st place in QWER HACKS 2021's Public Policy track! https://devpost.com/software/cityspace-live-in-your-safe-space