3rd place in SESI Cultura Digital Hackathon

The Circular App protoype was created during the 2-day Hackaton promoted by the SESI institute for its event Semana de Cultura Digital (Digital Culture Week).

The app is a way to connect people that wanted to donate itens to people that needed them. The interface consists of a feed of available itens, a way to post a new item and a chat window to define when and where to pick it up.

Our starting point was the event “Feira Grátis da Gratidão”, a weekly freecycling meetup in Rio de Janeiro where people donate and exchange their stuff.

The event has a Facebook group where people keep on donating itens, but it’s riddled with problems – as it’s a public forum, users frequently disagree over who should receive a donation and moderation has an awful lot of work to do.

With the hackaton on course, we sent a quick survey to the administrators of the group to get better insight into their daily operation. Reading through hundreds of messages on the group’s feed also helped defining the problem.

Thus, we arrived at two main pain points that the app should solve:

The first point was achieved by a semi-anonymous interface: in the app, the user donating the item only appears after she selects a user that will receive the donation, avoiding the headaches that happen in the Facebook group.

The second point happens by ordering the feed of itens algorithmically and giving priority the ones closer to you (either geographically or by facebook connections).

A shout-out to the team that took part in this project: