We are 4 weeks into our project, and we are well on our way to putting it together. Vincent and Leemor have been working on different aspects of the frontend. Vincent has been mocking up a rough prototype and also researching the best and most efficient ways to implement the frontend with the backend. Leemor has created a UML diagram of the frontend with all the final APIs between the different frontend, while also designing the user interface of the different frontend tasks.
On the backend, we have Michelle and Jeff. Jeff has been working on how the SMSs can be parsed so that the information is readable by the backend. Michelle has been implementing the tables for the database and creating an ER diagram to show how the tables will interact with each other. Our next goal is to get the API for the backend and finish the designs for the frontend so that we can start implementing some of the features.
GIN was inspired from Ushahidi’s collection of data from the Kenyan post-election. We want to abstract the information retrieval of text messages to other mediums as well as create an interface that is intuitive to the analyst who would be manually filtering the incoming information. Since manual processing of the data can be daunting (with 20,000+ messages to be filtered monthly), we are also thinking about automating the information filtering system after the infrastructure is established.