🤝 Sohayok — A Decentralized Emergency Help Network
Sohayok is a peer-to-peer assistance platform designed to concatenate demand and supply during critical moments. It serves as a digital bridge between donors, recipients, and volunteers to ensure that help reaches the needy at the right time.
💡 Inspiration
The inspiration for Sohayok came from observing the chaotic nature of emergency requests on social media. Helping the needy at the right time brings a huge impact on society, yet urgent pleas often get lost among irrelevant content. We built this sanctuary to ensure that the primary reason for suffering is not a lack of resources, but a lack of connection.
🤝 What It Does
Sohayok is a multi-service platform where users can register as either a Donor or a Recipient, with the flexibility to switch roles as needed.
- Six Exclusive Services: Users can choose from Food, Education, Cloth, Blood, Organ Sharing, and Financial Aid (Sohayok Pay).
- Volunteer Integration: A unique feature allowing passionate individuals to assist in delivering needs directly to a recipient's doorstep.
- Leaderboard: A dedicated leaderboard to recognize and rank volunteers based on their service performance.
🛠️ How We Built It
Built using a modern LAMP stack, our application focuses on dynamic routing and asynchronous coordination to manage the flow of services.
- Backend & Logic: PHP manages the "Feed the Need" logic, ensuring users are routed to the correct service workbaskets.
- Database: MySQL relational schema handles complex interactions between users, service requests, and volunteer assignments.
- Frontend: Mobile-first CSS with attractive icons for each service type to initiate the workflow instantly.
- Real-Time Coordination: AJAX (jQuery) enables live request tracking and instant communication between donors and recipients.
✨ Key Features & Innovation
1. Verification & Trust
To ensure that submitted details do not contain false information, Sohayok includes a dedicated Background Verification Process. Requests for sensitive services like Financial Aid or Education only move forward once the admin verifies the attached documents.
2. Sohayok Pay & Financial Aid
Recipients can raise money requests for themselves or others (friends/relatives) for predefined reasons such as illness, accidents, or natural calamities. It includes modal dialogs to thank donors and facilitates negotiated payment methods.
3. Comprehensive Service Flow
Whether it is Food, Cloth, or Blood, the system handles the case from initial request to volunteer pickup and final fulfillment feedback.
4. Progress Tracking
We implemented a Completion Status Progress Bar during registration and service requests to allow customers to track their status in real-time.
🚧 Challenges We Conquered
- Live Request Management: Making and managing live requests between donors and recipients was a significant hurdle.
- Service Prioritization: Choosing and handling the most needful services among six different categories required complex logic.
- Volunteer Routing: Coordinating the delivery of requirements from donor to recipient at the right time using volunteer assistance.
- Verification Logic: Ensuring that the case does not move forward unless background verification and terms and conditions are successfully met.
📚 Learning Experience
This project was a memorable learning journey where we mastered:
- Dynamic Routing: Routing cases to specific workbaskets based on role and service type.
- Customizing Portals: Creating unique user interfaces for different roles (Donor vs. Recipient).
- Complex Case Management: Handling the end-to-end lifecycle of varied services from Organ Sharing to Financial Aid.
🚀 What's Next for Sohayok
- Automated Document Verification: Using AI to speed up the background verification process.
- Expanded Volunteer Network: Enhancing the dynamic routing for volunteers based on proximity.
- Global Support: Scaling the infrastructure to support mutual aid across different regions and languages.
"Anybody can help, but help at the right time makes the big difference."
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