The inspiration comes from many events. Here are the ones that inspired us most.
Most members on the team have had episodes where we've needed support but didn't necessarily feel comfortable going to friends, or friends we're not useful. This platform is a way to extend one's support-network for moments where you feel under the weather and need someone to talk to.
We decided to harvest the power of volunteers to run this platform after witnessing overwhelming levels of support through Reddit. However, we are also aware that not everyone is comfortable sharing their story publicly, thus the idea of having one-on-one conversations.
Also, the power of conversation behind an anonymous username allows the users to truly be themselves. This is a safe-space for everyone: no one should ever be told to "Man up" or simply "Get over it".
As previously mentioned, it's a chat platform that connects users who needs to talk to someone, to volunteers who are open to helping others. Currently, users can only engage in one conversation with a volunteer; however volunteers can help multiple people simultaneously.
An important feature we wanted to implemented, but could not due to lack of time, resources and knowledge in the domain, was a Professional channel where volunteers who felt that they can't help the user would be able to refer them to a professional therapist (Psychologist, Psychotherapist, Psychiatrist, Social Worker, etc.). A screening process would be required as well as some sort of proof. These professionals could be volunteers, or eventually get revenue through ads.
The platform is currently running on a JavaScript front-end, designed mainly for mobile devices, and communicates with a Python server through REST APIs. Eventual iterations of the app would see a move to a native application allowing for push notifications.
Hey Google : How do I use a computer?
Initially, we started building the project as an Android application. However, Android's SDK, Java and setting up the environment on our team's computers proved to be impossible and thus the idea was abandonned.
Once we decided to move to JavaScript/Python, we ran into problems with the passing of information between the two languages : for some reason, JavaScript's JSON format was not the same as Python's (Flask) and it took some fiddling to get it to work.
Finally, the lack of sleep caught up with us at around 4 AM, and finalizing the UI became much more of a challenge for our tired minds.
We're demoing a working project! One of the members of our team learned HTML/CSS/JS and crushed it! (For a first-timer) A huge accomplishment we should be proud of is we stuck with our idea from the start and brought it to fruition.
The true meaning of Christmas! Seriously, we learned that next time, we should be prepared, as in have our environment ready, for mobile development : JDK and Android's SDK can be temperamental.
Go big or go home. (We're gonna go home and sleep thank you and good night)
We would obviously like to move it to a native application for Android in the future, as well as implement the missing features we were hoping to have!