StrandedHere.org

Portal to help stranded travelers communicate with each other during this COVID-19 crisis.

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Inspiration

Vivek, my teammate and my husband – together, we run a backpackers’ hostel in Laos in Southeast Asia. We meet many travellers in the course of a day and as the first few cases of COVID-19 started to kick in, a lot of the worries on travellers’ minds were – _ how am I going to get home? _

When we spoke to the travellers, we also found out that a number of them were looking to find other travellers from the same country who happened to be in the same situation as them.

As news reports started to surface, there were lots of news articles of groups of nationalities who were stranded in different parts of the world and who were trying to contact people, families, embassies, special groups, to try and get themselves home.

What it does

StrandedHere.org is a simple tool. It is meant to serve as a directory and a communication tool.

  1. Anyone can register/create an account with their name, nationality, current location and health status
  2. Once you’re registered, your name comes up in our directory of travellers. Anyone who is registered can look up people by name, nationality or current location
  3. You can then send a direct message to anyone you’d like to reach out to – whether to make travel arrangements, ask for assistance or support.

How we built it

  1. Ruby on Rails for the backend
  2. Google location API to let users enter their location
  3. Postgres to store all the information
  4. Mailboxer Gem for the communication function

Challenges we ran into

  1. Filtering communications based on nationality and location
  2. Google location API integration
  3. Creating awareness for the platform

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It’s only been less than a week since went live but we already have close to 30 registrations from all over the world. Everyone who’s seen our platform has given us really incredible feedback on the tool and the purpose behind it. We’ve also had multiple social shares in various social media communities and groups.

What we learned

  1. The importance of reacting quickly to current affairs and scenarios to come up with tools that could help people in need – the COVID-19 situation has shown how quickly we can act
  2. While building the product, we needed to be able to adapt and react based on what was happening around us – and ensure that our tool was providing the right resources/tools to help the people we intended
  3. Data and privacy will always be a concern and there’s a need to manage that and ensure that users do not feel violated

What's next for StrandedHere.org

  1. We would like to get more travellers registered on StrandedHere.org to assess the viability of a crowdsourced directory like this
  2. We would like to partner with embassies and consulates to help facilitate repatriation efforts for their citizens
  3. Eventually, this can be a platform that can go beyond the virus situation to help any traveller stranded in the future
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