Astro-Hearts

Perth | Space for Change

Tact-Trading

High-Level Project Summary

We have designed an application to facilitate the movement of critical resources between people in communities. By providing an avenue for community trade we address the issue of resource scarcity in marginalised communities and regions, such as Northern Australia, Oceania and Africa. Once the Tact- Trade system has been put in place, people will be able to evenly share goods and services with each other to encourage equitable outcomes. Tact- Trade allows people in need of resources to gather them in an ethical way by sharing necessary supplies, banding communities together and ultimately strengthen their ability to deal with the challenges of our changing climate.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1fiUyaRqNJQW-8zTHBG0cggOed4HozYjQfYYk5SDPKiU/edit?usp=sharing

Link to Final Project

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12Ea7dza5Ibz55ZJu0ksgKoEnNOBFdYY8?usp=sharing

Detailed Project Description

What exactly does it do?  

Our project connects people who need supplies with members of their community or other users in a similar area who can provide the necessary resources to them. The catalogue system works to facilitate community trade and resource allocation by allowing people to see what others are willing to give away and to post what they are willing to share. This allows communities to co-ordinate resources and ensure fair distribution. 

The in built communication system helps users organise transport of their needed supplies.  


Tact-Trade will allow users to create a catalogue of supplies they are willing to give to others, and look at the items others have offered that they may need. Users will be able to send out requests for certain goods or services essential to their community, with or without items to trade for, which other users can fulfil. 

There will be embedded communication systems to facilitate this trade between people, so they can organise how and when to receive or give either a good or service. 

Tact-Trade will have a public notice board of appeals, which will display appeals from users based on their time constraints and severity.  It would also include an identity check to prevent bots or cat-fishers from scamming people on the application. 


How does it work?  

Both individuals and communities can use the Tact-Trading app to contact others if they are in need of the products or services they may be offering.


TO GIVE A RESOURCE:

  • You select a resource you are willing to give
  • You select where you will be giving the resource from (and select if you will be providing the transport of it or not)
  • You post the offer
  • A request will be sent through if someone is in need of the resource you are offering
  • You can coordinate how you will give the person the item through the imbedded messaging system.


TO RECIEVE A RESOURCE:

  • You select the resource you need
  • You can narrow down your search based on area (you are restricted to sharing within your country)
  • You request the item from a user offering to give it to someone
  • Your request must be "fulfilled" by the offeror.
  • You can coordinate how you will receive the item through the imbedded messaging system.


Once the Tact- Trade system has been put in place, people will be able to share these goods and services with each other to encourage equitable outcomes. Our aim is for these communities to -instead of having unbalanced resources- all work with each other to evenly distribute these goods and services to the people who need them.  


What benefits does it have?  

Tact-Trading is extremely beneficial, especially to those who are in need. Individuals or communities may get the products or services they need for free with our application! As a result, Tact-Trading is beneficial to everyone and is built on a generosity system that aims to benefit less fortunate communities. Goods or services provided through this app will assist marginalised community in their present hazardous situation/environment. 


What do you hope to achieve?  

We hope to improve community unity to reduce resource inequality. By having communities work together, we want to foster a community that is better prepared to step in where governments fail and provide for themselves through the sharing of resources. 


Tact- Trade aims to bring light to regions where marginalised communities are facing an uneven division of resources and can bring about the equitable outcome of giving these resources to the people who need them most and splitting them up evenly.

 

What tools, coding languages, hardware, or software did you use to develop your project? 

Tools that were used in our application included Adobe XD enabling the creation of the application; Tact-Trading, without spending time writing code. Software such as Microsoft, Google docs, OneDrive, Notes and more was used to write and present information about Tact-Trading. Canva was used to draft and complete Astro-Heart's logo as a team, assisted by two group members who designed the logo. 


More about our project can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fz9C4tqP8cc7gB74crjMZTVW-jxnR_B3/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=114773376224522068564&rtpof=true&sd=true

Space Agency Data

Inspiration for our project:


Digging deep through NASA's data pathfinders, we discovered shockingly the increasing number of natural disasters occurring throughout the world. Using NASA’s FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System) we discovered the terrifying scale of the summer fires of the past few years. They affected every continent to some scale, with Africa and Australia blanketed with red fire indicators. Comparisons between old and new MODIS Flood Inundation maps revealed the increased levels of flooding around the globe, especially in tropical communities. The GRACE based groundwater drought indicator maps showed us the decline in aquifer water levels in certain areas and increasing chances of drought globally. These findings helped us identify numerous marginalised communities at risk due to environmental hazards and lack of access to resources. These included the aboriginal people of Australia, Pacific Islander people, homeless people, minority communities in America.  


https://earthdata.nasa.gov/earth-observation-data/near-real-time/hazards-and-disasters


This data inspired our team to create a product that could help out people when experiencing these types of natural disasters, because it is in times like those when resources become particularly scarce and communities need to share what they have the most.


Used in the document: Agricultural Issues Around the Globe





  • https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?l=MODIS_Combined_L3_IGBP_Land_Cover_Type_Annual,Reference_Labels_15m(hidden),Reference_Features_15m(hidden),Coastlines_15m,VIIRS_SNPP_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor(hidden),MODIS_Aqua_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor(hidden),MODIS_Terra_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor&lg=false&t=2018-12-04-T20%3A02%3A26Z
  •  https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/global-maps/MOD10C1_M_SNOW 
  • This information was used to create an example of how our app could be implemented in the country Greenland. The Global Snow Map gave us insight into the different amount of snow fall in Greenland, and we paired that with additional information found on Google to prove why farming in Greenland is unstable. This was used to show how trading of resources could benefit countries like Greenland who might have a large amount of food production in one area and less in another.

Hackathon Journey

Here is a quick summary of our Hackathon journey so far:  











  • Choosing a Challenge:  

On the journey to completion the first step proved to be a difficult one. The interesting nature of all the challenges led to a long debate over which one was to be chosen. We found, after a lengthy discussion, our interests divided among three challenges: Have Seeds will Travel, the Mission to Mars and Space for Change. At this crossroad we examined each challenge again and voted on which one would be the most interesting, which one we could gather data on the best and which one we could come up with the best solution to. We ended up picking Space for Change.











  • Interpreting the Challenge:  

After choosing a challenge, we spent a good amount of time interpreting it. We broke it down into three parts; We needed to find (a) a marginalised community affected by (b) a form of environmental injustice, and then we had to (c) come up with a solution to this injustice. All through the Hackathon we have re-read the challenge to make sure we are correctly solving it.











  • Pivoting Ideas

At the beginning of the Hackathon, we discussed choosing lack of water quality as our form of environmental injustice. We started to come up with three main questions to help us start researching on this topic. However, when we started researching which countries were especially affected by bad water quality, we started to receive contradictory information. We decided to get some help from the mentors, who, upon hearing our angle on this challenge, advised us tom look at it from a different perspective. Maybe to be a bit more creative. It was really when another group needed help from the mentors that we decided to stop, and call an emergency FaceTime to brainstorm more ideas. Thus, we came up with the challenge of unbalanced resource availability and decided to work on that instead.











  •  Re-Researching

We started to research on our chosen type of environmental injustice again, but this time, we decided to all choose a place where such injustice occurred and use the NASA data provided to us to demonstrate how our application would work in that city/country.











  • Designing our Application

Once done researching, most team members were confused about the function of the app we were making and how it would work. This lead our team to create an app mock-up to demonstrate the basics of how the app would work. We also made a flow-chart to demonstrate how the user will interact with the application and how it will be set out. After analysing these and some discussion we gained a much better vision of the final product.










  • Filling out our Project Page

While one team member finalised the mock-up app, the rest of us started to fill out this form. We split the work up, but decided to leave the Detailed Project Description until we could all write it together, because we figured that that was one of the most important parts of our Project Page.











  • Creating our Project Demo

To create our project demo, we all did a group FaceTime call so we could create it together. We used a shared Google Slides and used the 'Space Apps 2021 Project "Demo" Guide' as a template for our slideshow. We made sure we inserted images from our app mock-up to support our description of how it works and display what it might look like as a finished product. After consulting the mentors, we were advised to add in more pictures, statistics and diagrams to show information about our app rather than tell it. We edited our project demo to make sure this was the case and also re-did the layout to make it more engaging. We convened with the mentors again after making the changes and were able to use their new feedback to develop our slide deck even further.


Overall, we had a challenging yet rewarding Hackathon journey. We were able to light a path through initial fog of confusion and develop our skills.

References

Data





Tools




  • Flowchart: https://app.diagrams.net/
  • Logo: canva.com
  • App mock-up: Adobe Xd
  • Google drive + Google slides used for final project and project demo.

Tags

#resources #application #app #design

Global Judging

This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.

Space for Change

Marginalized communities are often disproportionately impacted by environmental hazards. Your challenge is to use NASA's Earth observation data to: 1) identify regions where such environmental injustice occurs, and 2) design implementable solutions that enable equitable outcomes.