Problem: uOttawa students often miss out on-campus events and communities because event information is scattered across multiple platforms like Discord, Eventbrite, Instagram, and Facebook. With no centralized platform, staying informed is challenging, leading to missed opportunities for connection and engagement.
Solution: uEvents is a social media platform built to help uOttawa students discover what they’re missing on campus. The goal was to transform the process of finding events and communities into something as simple as opening an app. Centralizing all campus event information in one place, uEvents ensures students can easily stay connected and never miss an opportunity to participate in campus life.
Within the first two months, the app achieved 500 signups and maintained an average of 50 daily active users. it also sparked discussions among students on platforms like Discord!
Additionally, we invested in a marketing campaign that involved putting up posters across campus, creating a dedicated Discord server, and launching an Instagram account to promote the app.
Despite initial success and positive feedback from students, uEvents was ultimately archived due to several challenges. The primary issue was scalability, particularly in attracting new users, especially event organizers. This created a "chicken and egg" problem, where the platform needed more clubs and events to attract students, but without a strong user base, it was difficult to engage organizers. Additionally, maintaining long-term user engagement and managing the resources needed for continuous updates became increasingly difficult.
Update on October 6th 2024: we are still getting requests from students asking about uEvents. Looks like we really made an impact on some of them! 😁
The following are some major features of uEvents:
| Browsing Events | Viewing Event Details | Saving Events | Browsing Clubs |
|---|---|---|---|
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Working with the university is challenging due to its bureaucratic nature, which hampered our progress. Additionally, the project began with eight members, making it difficult to manage tasks and decision-making effectively within such a large team.
As of February 2024, this project has been officially shut down and is no longer actively maintained. The app was primarily developed by @antoine2304 and @wumarc, with some contributions from several other team members who exited the project during its early stages. Please note that we are no longer accepting any contributions or updates, as the repository has been archived. Thank you to everyone who supported and showed interest in the project during its development.
For the front-end, we are utilizing React Native, a JavaScript library for building mobile applications. We are also using React Native Elements, a UI library that provides pre-built components, to facilitate the development process. In addition, we've opted to use TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript that offers optional static typing and many other features, to enhance our programming language. In addition to the UI library we are using, React Navigation is an important library we will make use of to implement routing and navigation features. on the backend, we have opted to use Firebase, a cloud-based platform.
To guide our development process, we have adopted the atomic design principle. this methodology emphasizes breaking down the user interface into smaller, reusable components, which can be combined to create larger, more complex layouts. You can learn more about the atomic design pattern here.