Master thesis : An open-source web platform to foster network-generalized exchanges of geolocalized, free, goods and services

Abstract

The social disaster due to flooding in Belgium in July 2021 and discussions with graphic design students of the ESA Saint-Luc Liège (Social and digital design) highlighted the need to have an easily deployable citizens’ self-help platform. Some websites showed potential to reach this goal, but were not easily deployable or were not centered on indirect exchange. Shareish (Share and cherish) is an open-source web platform to foster network-generalized exchanges of geolocalized, free, goods and services. It is implemented using Django as a backend framework and VueJS as a frontend framework. The deployment is done using Docker-compose (an extender of Docker) and NGINX as a proxy server. Shareish revolves around two classes, which are the User and the Item representing, respectively, a user of the platform and a donation/loan/request of a user. One of the great strengths of Shareish is its interactive map that shows the different items in their different locations to facilitate access to local exchange. Shareish also has an auto-tagging feature to facilitate the submission of user-generated items. This auto-tagging is done using MobileNetV3_Large. Shareish can be used by all, as it is open-source, on https://github.com/shareish/shareish.