Free Geek Price Insight: A Dashboard for Pricing Refurbished Technology for Twin Cities Nonprofit

Who is Free Geek?

Mission

Free Geek is a nationwide non-profit organization dedicated to promoting digital inclusion, environmental sustainability, and technology access for all. Much like its counterparts across the country, Free Geek Twin Cities is committed to reducing electronic waste by collecting, refurbishing, and responsibly recycling donated electronics. By extending the life of used or discarded devices and affordably selling them back to the public, Free Geek Twin Cities helps tear down barriers to technology that many from underprivileged communities face.

Workflow

Free Geek Twins Cities is a building in Minneapolis that contains a thrift store, a build lab where volunteers can learn to refurbish modern PCs, and several back rooms that house the departments of Free Geek. Departments at Free Geek mean one category of technology (like Gaming) or one task (like Recycling). For each item, the employee in the respective department will decide if it is worth refurbishing, determine its market value, then they will price the item (note that Free Geek aims to price items under market value to bridge the digital divide). Finally, they will fill out a detailed summary sheet about the item, tailored to their department.

In the build lab, volunteers refurbish PCs under the supervision of the Build Lab staff. These staff estimate the item's price, then bring the item to the Modern Build department.

The head of the Modern Build department uses the Build Lab price as a baseline, but also uses eBay and Google to conduct market research. To do this, the department manually computes the average price of relevant data points. Then, they fill out a new item label, based on a summary sheet from the build, to put in the thrift store alongside the item. This process typically takes about 10 minutes per item and is very similar to how pricing is done in the Mac department.

Our Project

The Problem Our Tool Aims to Solve

We found that this pricing process in the Modern Build and Mac departments acts as a significant bottleneck for Free Geek; there is a backup of items in these departments. Thus, we decided to focus our efforts on streamlining these processes by building a tool that enables the user to conduct market research, calculate relevant statistics, and generate and print a label, without the manual efforts that were previously necessary.

The Tool

First, the user must select the category of item they are pricing; this choice corresponds to the database table in which the app will search as well as the appearance and content of the form they can later complete. From there, the user can conduct a keyword search.

Submitting this search brings the user to a coprehensive market research page. On the left, they will find quick links to the same search on Google, eBay, and Terapeak, as well as the opportunity to edit their original search. On the top right, they will see two graphs and statistics analyzing historical pricing trends at Free Geek and will have the opportunity to refine their search with filters based on price, date, and individual item checkboxes. Below this are the complete list of historical machines that have been previously entered in by any Free Geek user. After considering market trends, the user can continue on to the logging stage by clicking Continue.

Should the user choose to log this machine in the database, they will be brought to a new page where they will fill out the appropriate form juxtaposed with the appropriate auto-populating label, depending their choice of item category. After completing the form, the user can click Print and Save to Database, which adds an entry to the appropriate table in the database and opens a new tab on the user's browser with the completed label for printing. From there, the user can return to the initial search page or log another machine.

Project Documentation

Linked below is documentation concerning our tool, its implementation, and how to make changes.

Group Members

Meet our comps group members: