Inspiration
A lot of people are looking for help within their communities. But not everyone can get the help they need either because they are new to the area or they are just not good in social interactions. Just because they can't start the conversation doesn't mean they can't keep one going.
What it does
Our website is a connection between the members of community. A person who is in need of help can post their request for help on the website and any volunteer who is willing to help can text the person on the website and talk and help them.
How we built it
We used wix for the website. We used velo for most of the functionality and also integrated twilio into our project as the means for communication between the volunteer and the person who needs help.
Challenges we ran into
The fact that it was just the 2 of us and wix not allowing collaborative work made it really hard fir us to work together. Wix, although being fast and good for beginners, is not really the best choice for people who love full control over the elements and functions. It being fast was the only reason it was chosen over the freedom of having complete authority of css and html.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This was my first time working with velo. As someone who does not have a lot of experience with javascript, this was a bit hard. But we eventually got the hand of it.
Twilio was really fun to use(I was really surprised that it worked on my first try).
What we learned
Better to not use wix than use wix.
Have 2 members instead of 4 does not mean we are taking up twice the amount of work, it just means we are going to be the most efficient that we possibly can.
What's next for Volunteer Inc
Volunteer Inc has a lot of potential which was sadly undercut due to both, the time limit and the number of people. one of the first things to fix about our website is the ux. The design has a long way to go. There are 2 other features I desperately wanted to add to the current version. The first, being a rating system for the individuals who are helped. This creates a feedback loop which makes work that is not meant for volunteers be replaced by stuff that are reasonable for volunteers and they never feel like they are being used. The second is an in site reward system with progression checkpoints for volunteers. This gives an incentive for people to wanna volunteer but since it is gonna be an in site reward system and not necessarily irl rewards, thsi will not push the people to go out of their way to do something.
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