You seeking the truth could save someone's life
Inspiration
As we know, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has left us in a state of wonder. Such an open attack was hard to imagine for us. And now, we are not entirely sure what to make of it and are often left confused. Much credit for that goes to the media, which is filled with false news about the War. This is where Disaster Data comes in. It allows the people stuck in Ukraine to report live and true news to us without a middleman.
What it does
The whole idea was to eradicate fake news so I went through a lot of steps to make sure nothing false makes its way through. Among other things, the most important step was to collect the metadata for the images and videos sent and make sure the timestamp and location for them is as reported. This would of course leave the people’s data at risk, as for someone stuck in the middle of a war, having their data leaked would be problematic for sure. But this is where Sonr comes in and saves the day. Their decentralized database system helps us make sure that the data collected is safe.
Moving forward, while helping real news reach people is surely important, that is not where I wanted to stop. I came up with the idea of having relief providers in the USA and other countries sign up as well. We will help them get directly in touch with the survivors and provide them with immediate help. And for us as witnesses of this, we will also have the option to donate money to the caregivers directly.
How we built it
This was built using Flutter, Firebase, and Sonr's Flutter SDK called Motor_flutter. Flutter was used for both the front end and integrating the back end with firebase functions. Sonr's SDK helped with setting up authentication and a decentralized data storage system.
Challenges we ran into
Working on the project alone, I think the biggest challenge I had was time. There were a lot of blockchain and Machine learning-related ideas that I had that I would have loved to implement, but couldn't. I was using a non-firebase authentication system for the first time as well, so it did take some did getting used to.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I am proud of the fact that I was able to create a very functional full-stack mobile and web application that is capable of helping people out almost immediately. I felt like I did a pretty decent job with the UI, which looks very clean and easy to use while having great functionality at the same time.
What we learned
I learned how to implement new libraries into my application by going through the documentation. It was also fun to learn about so many great ways that Flutter can handle things.
What's next for Disaster Data
I believe that this combination of legit news and providing help to the people of Ukraine will definitely prove to be extremely beneficial to our society. But of course, the effects of this won’t stop there. While I wish this wasn’t true, it is hard to say that there won’t be any more victims in future wars. While the current focus is on Ukraine, this app can essentially be expanded into a much bigger disaster management system, which also supports free media without any interference.