abcge

Reward System to incentivise potential volunteers
List of Volunteering Opportunities
Volunteer Sign-up page

1. What is your chosen theme and problem statement?

Theme: Giving Back Problem Statement: Qn 1. Volunteering is one of the best ways to give back to our community. What creative ideas do you have to make volunteering easier, widespread, and more beneficial to those in need?

2. What does your hack do?

HelpLeh! is a one stop platform for volunteers and organisers of volunteer expeditions connect, to help the community in need. Through this application, potential volunteers will be able to find volunteering opportunities and sign up for them easily. On the other hand, volunteering organisations can use this application to find volunteers easily.

3. How does your hack answer the problem statement?

The Individual Giving Study 2021 found that 22 per cent of Singapore residents volunteered in the past 12 months, down from 29 per cent in 2018. Currently, volunteering opportunities have to be self-sourced, it is troublesome and out of the way for potential volunteers to contact volunteering organisations to offer their help. Moreover, organisers have to manually manage their volunteer manpower and may also face fluctuating manpower.

With HelpLeh!, the woes of volunteers and organisations are no more, it bridges the gap between them and helps streamline the process of volunteering and finding volunteers. Further, the incentive system, funded by charitable organisations, make it so that users are incentivised to volunteer themselves for those in need.

4. How did you built your hack?

We didn't sleep. Drank coffee bean and tea leaf. Then several cups of expresso.

On the technical aspect, we built our hack with Next.js and Firebase. We opted for Next.js for its fast page load speed, server-side rendering and ease of use. Firebase provided a convenient backend as a service (BaaS) with out the box authentication and database service which were key to implementing our idea.

5. What are some difficulties you overcame?

Not all of us were familiar with the frameworks we chose. As such, in the beginning, we had to catch ourselves up to scratch with the frameworks to code out the features. We overcame the time constraints of this hackathon through effective delegation of responsibilities. It helped us speed up the coding process as we tried to work on what we were each most comfortable with. Firebase's nosql datastructure made it difficult for us to create a one to many relationship, and after much debugging, we had to do it manually using a for loop to fetch the documents one by one, which was very inefficient.

6. What was your biggest learning point from LifeHack 2022?

As we progressed, we realised that our choice of frameworks and database might not have been the most optimal. Hence we learnt: when building software, choosing the right tech stack is key. With the right tools, developers can create softwares that are impactful, and do so efficiently.