A platform that connects someone who needs aid with someone who can provide it. Driven by a simple loop. People like us putting up situations that need attention and organisations/people picking them up on the other end and resolving them.
In the light of recent events and the decision to extend the lockdown, I and my colleague Karthik wanted to build a platform to help the people affected by the pandemic, someplace where their grievances could be voiced to volunteers who could help.
This started as an idea over zoom catchups, post our daily office standup meetings, but soon we decided to give it a go and started conceptualizing the idea with one of our friends, Atul who was willing to help with the design.
It took us a month of our spare time, mostly over the weekends to put together the first version of the web app, that’s when we realized we will need sponsorships from companies to get the project running. Thankfully, we received free credit grants from companies like Twilio, Digital Ocean, and MongoDB to get started. These grants were quite generous and got us this far to launch it for public use.
We built a full stack solution using NodeJS, MongoDB & VueJS. Integrated it with Mailgun for Email alerts and Twilio for SMS and Whatsapp alerts. Adding to this we also developed a Whatsapp bot that helps people post aid requests with location and contact details and for volunteers and NGO organizations to check for any aid requests from zip code and location.
Furthermore, we went ahead and open-sourced the platform on Github to help other regions of the world to address the crisis.
We have launched this for India and will launch for the USA too.
