Civic Tech · Geospatial · Hackathon
Hungrily
Matching surplus food and volunteers to people who need them, by location
Problem
Food redistribution efforts often fail on logistics, not intent — matching a surplus report to the nearest volunteer, fast enough for the food to still be usable.
Engineering challenge
Build location-aware matching under hackathon time constraints: a chatbot intake flow, a geospatial matching engine, and a live view of demand density, all working together by demo time.
What I built
- MERN application with GeoJSON-based location matching between surplus reports and nearby volunteers
- IBM Watson Assistant chatbot for structured intake of food-donation and request details
- A heatmap view of food requests by population density to guide volunteer routing
Media
Outcome
Placed in the top 20 nationally at the IBM WITACE Hackathon.