[Coding Seedlings] GreenHarmony

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GreenHarmony

Tackling Problem Statement 2, GreenHarmony is a community-centric volunteer management platform for Ground-up Initiative (GUI).

We aim to affirm and recognise the contributions of volunteers and cultivate a deeply-rooted community. GreenHarmony is a digital system that streamlines the volunteering process from volunteer registration to contribution recognition.

This digital platform emphasizes tracking learning outcomes based on activities and bringing the community together.

Why GreenHarmony?

The climate crisis getting more critical as the years go by. We resonate strongly with Ground-up Initiative's hope to connect people more to Earth and "touching the soil" in order to create empathy.

Gathering Requirements

We dug deep into the problem statement provided and the insights given during the QnA session. The two biggest thorns in Ground-up Initiative's side is that: 1) Keeping the Kampong Spirit is hard 2) Measuring empathy towards the climate crisis is hard

After much discussion, asking why and whiteboarding, we narrowed down the problem into four key aspects. A. Participants may feel that its hard to start meetups themselves B. There may be a lack of intrinsic motivation C. There is no meaningful way of tracking and showing cumulative effort D. There is a lack of framework to track an individual's growth

Two Pronged Approach

With these, we settled on making a digital platform for GUI’s physical platforms (as they call it, such as composting, earth oven).

The digital platform's features generally fall under a two pronged approach:

Activity-based Community Development
Skills-based Personal Growth

These approaches and features that come with it aim to tackle the root problems faced by GUI.

How we built it

Using the T3 stack, we implement a modern, server-side rendered application which is highly efficient and secure. TypeScript allows us to perform static type checking, allowing us to quickly and efficiently perform remote procedure calls with tRPC.

We take advantage of cloud infrastructure by deploying on Vercel. This allows us reduce request latency and achive a highly-available, horizontally-scalable, infinite-scaling application, allowing users to enjoy a seamless experience with little loading time.

Challenges we ran into

We developed with the latest versions of software available on npm, but this also meant that we would run into multiple bugs and compatibility issues with other libraries as they are not fully integrated. By digging through StackOverflow and GitHub issues we were able to eliminate the possible causes of problems, such as finding out about existing regressions in the latest zod libraries. This was an excellent learning experience that will come in handy as future software engineers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We implement a passwordless login feature that allows users to login to our application through magic link. Emails are signed using a DKIM key, and is verified by the receiving mail server through a DNS TXT record to prevent our emails from being impersonated by potential attackers.

What's next for GreenHarmony

We hope to work together with Ground Up Initiative to implement more exciting features that we were not able to fit within this short timeframe, such as a admin management platform, email reminders for event participants on upcoming events, as well as skills-based user matching, where we would be able to generate conversation starters for participants meeting for the first time and help them break the ice.