We believe 12K brains can do better than 4. We built a collaborative platform in which the whole EPFL community is empowered to suggest improvements for the sustainability of the campus. Enjoy!
Visit our demo webpage to try our project. Otherwise, take a look at some screenshots of the app in our Devpost submission.
What's the biggest asset that EPFL has? People: students, faculty, PhDs, Staff. What do we want to solve? Reducing waste and making the campus more sustainable.
While brainstorming, we realized that during our daily life as students we notice a lot of possible improvements that EPFL could implement, often related to energy waste. That’s why we decided to create a tool that empowers everyone in the EPFL community to propose their ideas. They can be as simple as proposing to fix a door that stays open and dissipates heat, but also more complex ones, involving several aspects of the campus life. There is no better watchdog than the people that live on campus everyday.
The goal of this project is twofold: raise awareness of daily habits that have a bad impact on the environment, and make the members of the community aware of the effort that EPFL is putting into tackling sustainability challenges.
The tool motivates the members of the community to propose ideas by the means of a public leaderboard and a competition between sections. Every user is awarded points for each contribution which is approved by EPFL staff. Also, students can see in real-time statistics summarizing submitted and accepted proposals, so they can see the actual impact of their ideas. Finally, through the upvote tool, they can support proposals of their peers.
At the same time, the transparency in showing the current status of each proposal will strengthen the efforts of the EPFL staff to realize ideas proposed by the community and commit to sustainability.
We implemented a web app using Python, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flask and PostgreSQL. This app could be easily integrated inside the EPFL Campus app, widely used among the members of the community. We implemented the main features of the platform: people can enter proposals, add upvotes, see others’ proposals on the map and staff can handle proposals in a trello-like board connected to the database we have created.
Since our background is Data Science and not Software Engineering, we had no experience in building front-ends or back-ends. This was a serious challenge since we had to learn how to set up a backend server, build a fully functional front-end, link them both, etc.
However, the main challenge was to brainstorm on how to motivate the EPFL community to use this system. We spent an important part of the hack time carefully thinking about the best way to build the project.
- Giacomo Orsi
- Francesco Salvi
- Roberto Ceraolo
- Jordi Cluet
This project was part of Lauzhack2022.
