rhinoinani / legal_nest_app

This is a platform to help you find solutions to your legal problems for free with the help of a community.

Legal Nest

Link to the website repo

Inspiration

Living our daily lives as normal, we consistently hear of social injustice. The most common way we see these events be brought into the limelight is with social media platforms as this allows the word to spread extremely quickly to an extremely wide range of different people with different perspectives. Although this method is extremely effective as we’ve seen, social media platforms are not dedicated to this specific issue. Therefore, it could be hard to get legal help and attention even though the word of the event has been spread.

What it does

Legal Nest is a social media platform for social justice issues that occur in our everyday lives. It is not always easy to get the help you need when entangled in legal issues, so this site allows you to turn to the community and eventually get help from our legal team. The website allows you to post your encounters with those such as the police and get the opinion of the people. On our mobile app, you can also record directly from the platform. You can also browse other people’s posts and show your support by giving them alike. The top posts each week will get the help they need from our aforementioned legal team.

How we built it

In the project's planning stages, we used Figma, a graphic design tool, to decide what our website and mobile app would look like. The next step was choosing a front-end framework to build the website and mobile app. While deciding on how we would create the website, we considered many options including plain HTML & JavaScript, React, Angular, Vue, Svelte. In the end, we landed on React JS because it was a framework that we were all familiar with and simple support for the libraries we planned on using. For our mobile app, we considered using React-Native and Flutter. We ended up using Flutter because React Native did not provide the level of performance that we wanted. For our backend, we chose Firebase because the usability and features that Firebase offered at the free level fulfilled our needs and had accessibility for both our web and mobile application.

Challenges we ran into

• Because we used two different frameworks, making the front end look similar was difficult as we had to deal with the different components in each language. To prevent inconsistencies, we had one member focus on the design so that other members could reference the design while creating the front-end displays.
• One member went on a trip and had difficulty contributing and communicating with the group due to spotty WiFi and a lack of free time. Despite this, he was able to add styling to the projects and create designs in Figma.
• During the last two days of the hackathon, one member has pulled away due to immovable events leaving us shorthanded in the final days of the hackathon.
• Another issue we faced was staying within the firebase free tier. This was because the uploading and viewing of videos used up quite a bit of the available bandwidth, so we had to make changes to the ways we read and wrote to the database to stay within the free tier.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Despite our less than ideal situation and ambitious goal, we were able to create a functioning, polished, and well-designed website and mobile application that interacted with a cloud database in a short amount of time.
• We are proud that we were able to create both a mobile app and website that we are proud of despite having to split up our group to work on either the mobile app or website at once.

What we learned

• We learned to create and work on a web/mobile development project as a team because we have all done individual projects before, but this is one of our first group projects like this.
• We learned a lot about creating and designing SVG files as we were able to create a scalable vector graphic for our logo
• We also learned a lot about database structure because our database documents were structured in several different ways before our final structure.

What's next for Legal Nest

In the future, we plan to add more features like comments and hashtags. Additionally, we would like to get more users so that more awareness about social injustices is spread. Furthermore, we can involve a legal team to give legal advice for the most supported posts on Legal Nest.