Volucon

Inspiration

Building a website that connects volunteers and organizations is a great idea that can make a positive impact on society. The inspiration behind such a website could stem from a desire to bridge the gap between those who want to help and those in need of help. With the increasing number of social and environmental issues, there's a growing need for volunteerism and support from the community. By connecting volunteers with organizations, this website can help match individuals with causes they care about, providing a platform for them to make a meaningful impact.

Moreover, this website can help organizations reach a wider audience and find volunteers with specific skills or interests. By bringing people together, the website can foster a sense of community and collaboration, making it easier for organizations to achieve their goals and for volunteers to make a difference.

What it does

Let's understand it with the help of some prominent examples. Like HackThisFall, MLH decides in future to conduct a big event and is in search of volunteers so the platform would send the request post of MLH to volunteers who prefer to volunteer in the technical domains like technical writing, mentoring, designing teams etc. People with the right skill sets as required for the organization will be connected. Another example- nowadays there are many community fund-raisers and events organized by NGOs, for conducting large-scale events like this, the NGO will be connected to interested volunteers who are willing to help promote the cause behind the event. The request Organizations can have a code of conduct, to explain to the volunteers what exactly their role is and what protocols they are required to follow.

How we built it

We built it using the tech stack Django Rest Framework for Backend and ReactJS for frontend. In Backend we first started with building database models for Volunteer Profiles, Organization Profiles and Events. We also added user authentication. In Frontend we have made landing page, Profile edit page, and Org Profiles pages for users to update there Profile info.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge we faced is desging the model for database for optimising our crud operation queries. The second challenge was to program so that we can find recommendations of opportunities for volunteers based on there preferences.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we could make endpoints that are fully functional and constitute upto 50% of our whole idea.

What we learned

While building this project we learnt it is important to design the website/app that you are building rather than straight away jumping into coding part. We also learnt to read documentation and try to implement from it, as each idea needs customization of default functions that any framework provides. And also learnt about some new errors, as always there some errors that you see for the first time, and you have to google a lot to solve them.