GreenBook Volunteering

Inspiration

From personal experience, we knew that volunteering was hard, not because of the task itself, but rather finding the right organizations.

One of us, Pradhyum, has a personal experience relating to this. 4 years before, when he was searching for a volunteering opportunity, he had found a very good opportunity: it was volunteering, and it had coding in it! However, he quickly recognized that these opportunities were hard to come by. Because of this, he is still sticking with the same volunteering organization even though similar opportunities may exist elsewhere.

Additionally, Shrey and Adriano were looking for volunteering organizations to help for their National Junior Honor Society project, but because of the lack of a centralized place to look for it, it was hard to find such an organization.

Based on these personal reasons, we quickly decided to create an app to address the shortcomings in the existing volunteering ecosystem: GreenBook Volunteering.

What it does

GreenBook Volunteering allows users to research organizations, look for events that they may be interested in, and register for those events. It includes many features of social media to allow people to share with each other the ideas, observations, and recommendations that they had learned through experience. It also includes an innovative reputation system called ARS which incentivizes both volunteers and organizations to help each other.

It also made no sense to create a volunteering app that doesn't give back to the community, so our code is fully open-source to allow people to read and improve upon our code.

How we built it

We decided to use Flask with Python to rapidly implement a prototype. We also used Bootstrap to provide our CSS.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we faced was burnout. We had an ambitious list of features to implement, but it was hard to find where we were in terms of progress. This led to us wasting time trying to figure out where we were.

In addition to this, none of us had much experience with web apps, so we're sure we made many novice mistakes, causing us to continuously lower our expectations of what we were going to build.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was all of our first major web app. None of us had really focused on web apps before, so getting off the ground and building what we have was a huge achievement in and of itself.

Another accomplishment that we're proud of is our integration of Twilio into our web app. It took us over 2 hours, but we stuck to it, deciphered the documentation, and sent our first text using it all by ourselves.

Finally, the creation of a novel idea in 24 hours was something all of us could be proud of.

What we learned

All of us learned the structure and design behind a web app. We also gained hands-on experience designing and building one from the ground up. Since we also tried to lessen our influence on copying and pasting code and thus truly gained an understanding of what we were building.

What's next for GreenBook Volunteering

In order to truly make the experience better for our users and to help volunteering organizations find volunteers who are actually interested in their goals, we have a plethora of features we'd like to implement, such as:

Adding ratings for organizations
Making the signup process more customizable
Making the UI more understandable and easier to navigate
Making the site accessible to a wider audience These improvements will hopefully make the signup process and recruiting process much easier for users and organizations. Most importantly, however, is the process of encouraging volunteering and making the world a better place through it.