COVIDUNITESHUMANITY

COVIDUNITESHUMANITY Connecting world using techonlogy Whatsappp & Googleforms and helping needy

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Inspiration

Come together as a community to constructively fight COVID-19 by pooling in skills and talents to actively engage the community remotely to build out a tool which can streamline information from authentic sources and to empower those in need such as senior citizens, disabled people or anybody in dire need for help

What it does

One place to interact for Covid19 Support.Establish a unified technical platform to actively engage volunteers and connect them with people in need and provide authentic information and thereby support to deal with Covid19 situation. Below are features in brief the tool will aim to provide to aid the local community • Timely and Single source of authentic information to the community • Leverage on volunteer skills and talent for better community outreach. • Opportunity to contribute through donations or help the needy by delivering products within the constraints of the country lockdown rules. • Alert on availability of highly demand necessity products at the nearest store e.g. toilet papers, sanitizer etc. • Provide emergency contacts for travel, medical help or any urgent immigration issues. • Provide location based information including nearby volunteer availability to aid person in need where possible

How I built it

A team of volunteers brainstormed the requirements and agreed to build a Whatsapp chatbot to provide light weight information and use website for any complex user queries. Steps below

  1. The team explored tools such as Landbot and Twilio and decided to go with the free version of twilio to begin with
  2. To cater for complex needs such as search or alerts or volunteer registration, the chatbot provides urls to navigate to a website which then allows the user to submit requests through google forms and angular.

Challenges I ran into

1) Technical challenges such as building a good GUI using the free version of Twilio is a challenge and it is not trivial to code graphics in python. We can’t go beyond basic text format and using standard emojis. 2) On the technical front with the free version of Twilio, a separate web server needs to be running to host python scripts. We are yet to explore the paid version of Twilio and find out whether for the monthly ongoing cost a web server to host the custom python scripts is provided along with the sandbox. 3) Seems to be a complex process to get a business sign off from Facebook for a community project 4) Generating funds for on going operation cost for a community project is a challenge.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We started with ideation phase and then put together a small volunteer team of four very quickly with one volunteer bringing in the requirements and the other three techies fleshing out a viable working prototype in 5 hours from start to finish. The prototype is currently under review by community leaders in Germany and we are going to continue to invest more time on the tool whilst awaiting to hear back.

What I learned

1) Support to community is the real need of the hour to fight COVD-19 disaster. 2) Community as a whole are positive and more than willing to help whichever way. 3) In an era of social distancing and the current trend of remote working, education and information through technology is key in increasing the community outreach and reducing the impact of the disaster.

What's next for COVIDUNITESWORLD

Share the project with the various community stakeholders in Germany and spread the word about the tool. Also get help with funding for the project

Built With

  1. #Twilio
  2. #Python
  3. #GoogleForms
  4. #Angular

Code Repo Link https://gitlab.com/covid.iahv/covid.iahv.whatsapp.chatbot

Document (Chatbot Ideathon.pdf) link below https://gitlab.com/covid.iahv/covid.iahv.whatsapp.chatbot/-/tree/master/covidchatbotApp/doc

We also have a Node.js implementation deployed on the cloud to test.

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