Inspiration
The governments continue to tell everyone, especially the at-risk population, to stay at home, but there isn't much guidance provided on how to do this. There are non-profit organizations that offer free delivery services targeting the financially-needy population but leave out the at-risk population, which can afford to pay for their needs. Many times, this target population feels like they will be abusing the system by leveraging services that primarily target the financially-needy population. Lastly, the usual delivery services like specific stores' click-n-go type of offerings and Instacart are backed up to the point that they become impractical. All of this is happening while many individual volunteers are looking for ways to help.
What it does
Our goal is to connect the at-risk folks with the willing volunteers, who have a much lower risk, to help safely meet the needs while minimizing any exposure of the at-risk people to the virus.
How we built it
Firebase to host the database, API (serverless), authentication, and any other pieces that it offered to speed up the development. React for the frontend.
Challenges we ran into
Firebase was relatively new to the developers and presented a significant learning curve. We found volunteer frontend React developers while no Firebase volunteers came. Also, finding dedicated volunteers with enough time and experience has been quite hard.
Part of the challenge is reaching out to the target group because of perception and technology challenges. We are looking into adding low-tech methods like a dedicated phone line as a possible solution.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to release the alpha version within a week of the project kickoff and the production version on Sunday, March 29. We have had 120 volunteers sign up within the first 24 hours, and have had four delivery requests fulfilled.
What we learned
Now that we have our platform up and running, we are starting to understand how critical marketing and simple messaging is. We continue to solicit feedback from our users and make updates to ensure a smooth user experience both the volunteer and the at-risk population.
What's next for CV19 Assist
Continue to build out the platform with extra focus on the privacy and safety aspects while making sure that the incoming requests are correctly routed and completed quickly.
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