Promote Small Businesses:
One of the first challenges we would like to address is, "How do we promote the presence of small businesses throughout the community?", which in our example is the Raleigh-Durham- Chapel Hill metro area.
Our solution focuses on building a central directory of small businesses in our community by sourcing data from public datasets of local cities and counties, local business associations such as Cary Chamber of Commerce, and Federal Small Business Administration Database. We have also created a Self Registration Portal that small businesses can use to self register their presence.
Our solution uses three primary channels to promote the presence of small businesses. First, we provide a consumer search portal where consumers can directly search our small business directory. Second, we provide API services to third party companies, for example popular delivery services such as Instacart, GrubHub, and UberEats that can use our data to promote them in their services. Third, we use search and social media services to achieve a broader reach, for example, TownOfCary, that has a broader twitter following, can tweet about small businesses in our community.
Provide Resources to Small Businesses:
The second challenge we would like to solve is, "How do we efficiently distribute resources to small businesses in need?" In order to achieve this, we have enriched our small business directory with the financial needs and the potential new opportunities of small businesses.
First, local government officials at the Small Business Administration District office use data from NASA COVID 19 trends to decide what cities are most affected.
Second, the official decides what types of small businesses in those affected areas are in most need and what those businesses are.
Third, the official looks at potential new business opportunities for those businesses, for example, a tailor who struggles to make ends meet can now get a small business loan or stimulus fund to produce masks for the community.
Self Sustainable Growth:
Our vision is to expand our offering to build a self-sufficient eco- community. As our solution collects data from various sources, our data store enriches. For example, we can gather UN Population Growth trends data in our community, combine it with community planning data and our small business data.
We can develop machine learning models that can predict a multitude of scenarios for future pandemics and crisis responses. For example, with these planning models, we can predict supply shortages within our community, thereby proactively promoting small businesses to achieve self sufficiency for our future.
The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are clearly visible throughout the world, with business and economy being one of the primary areas that are affected. For one of our team members, Prathmesh Patel, this is something that is relatable. Being from a family of small business owners, the impacts of the stay-at-home orders and social distancing guidelines on small businesses is something that he can witness very closely. Additionally, with most of our team being from the Research Triangle Park area in North Carolina, a place with a rapidly booming business sector, the struggle of small businesses during these times is also something that is very apparent.
Consequently, developing a solution for such businesses was paramount to us. However, we didn’t just want to limit ourselves to creating direct solutions for small businesses, but we also wanted to incorporate the local governments’ relief efforts into our solution. Additionally, we also wanted to take measures so that businesses and governments are better equipped for such future times of crisis. So, helping small businesses thrive, crafting indirect solutions, and future planning became the foundational goal of our idea.
This is where we pulled in COVID-19 data from NASA and collected data from local government to build small business and their financial risk datasets.This combined with population growth trend data from NASA, can prove extremely beneficial in creating prediction models to address our goal. Throughout the project, we used several tools and software to create prototypes and demonstrations, including Adobe xD, Microsoft Excel, VS Code, Microsoft Powerpoint.
One of the challenges that we faced was finding the relevant datasets for our models. To overcome this we had to rely on 3rd party datasources that provided the required data in a consumable format. Another challenge that we faced while creating the solution was organizing the presentation of our solution. Since our solution comprises many sectors, presenting it the most efficient and concise manner was an issue that we faced, and solved as a team, through collaboration.
Link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kFWVzP8HPY7nAYvYCZ2tgXFncIPK63UF
Project materials:
EcoCommunitiesPresentation.pptx - Project presentation
EcoCommunitiesVideo.mov - Video demonstration
Screenshots.docx - Screenshots of solution components
Small Businesses Data for Cary, NC
Town of Cary - https://data.townofcary.org/pages/homepage/
Cary Chamber of Commerce - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XzWconOgh5AR3sHg
A-xcm64JwO1jfjNmCdUS2pfbh9E/edit#gid=258331229
COVID-19 Data
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases- updates/cases-in-us.html
NCDHHS Covid-19 Response - https://covid19.ncdhhs.gov/dashboard
Population growth Data
SEDAC Population Estimation Service - https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/mapping/popest/pes-v3/
Macrotrends - https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23110/raleigh/population
Others
USDA - https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/
Manufactured in North Carolina - https://www.manufacturednc.com/