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GivingBack.sg

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LifeHack 2022 write-up

What is your chosen theme and problem statement?

We have chosen the giving back theme, question 1. Our idea aims to make volunteering simpler and more widespread by collating volunteering opportunities into a site where people can easily find a suitable position to volunteer for.

What does your hack do?

Our hack is a website where we will have listings of volunteering opportunities. The listing will have brief descriptions of the volunteering position as well as tags such as ‘Elderly’, ‘Animals’ to help potential volunteers sort the listings to find positions they are interested in. The positions will also have tags indicating if they are valid for VIA hours for students looking to volunteer. After volunteering, we have a telegram bot which is able to print out a pdf certifying the number of hours of volunteering the user has done.

The website has a history of volunteering as well as a leaderboard for the number of volunteer hours by the users of the site. The history of volunteering will have a brief summary of the total hours volunteered along with a breakdown of the time volunteered in various types of positions, as well as a detailed list of past activities volunteered. The leaderboard will contain a list of the users who have volunteered the most out of the user base, alongside the challenges the user is currently embarked on.

Last but not least, our hack has a friend function. Users are able to contact other users whom they share similar interests with and participate in an activity as a group.

How does your hack answer the problem statement?

As giving back to society becomes more popular in recent times, more volunteering opportunities have been cropping up from all areas. However, it has become difficult to find the most suitable opportunity. For students, the difficulty is further increased with schools making community service a requirement with a set number of hours to fulfil. As a result, students have to find school approved volunteer opportunities and often have to chase the organiser to get certifications of their service hours. This troublesome process often results in students simply taking part in events which they do not resonate with. With their mindset not in the right place, the experience for beneficiaries would not be pleasant as well.

With GivingBack.sg, students can easily find school approved activities and keep track of their total hours served without the need to keep searching or emailing the organiser to certify their service. This would allow students to pick causes which they actually feel for and make volunteering a much more pleasant experience for both the student as well as the beneficiary.

With a community based system in place, individuals can also take part in challenges within social groups or the entire community. Winners of large-scale challenges could potentially win prizes from sponsors while challenges within social groups can allow friends to stay motivated to keep helping to maintain their spot on the leaderboard.

A Telegram bot is also made for users to easily confirm their hours using a code given by the organiser at the end of the event or simply to generate a pdf of their entire service history.

How did you build your hack?

We initially started by ideation of how we should tackle the issue at hand. We came up with a list of issues that makes volunteering more difficult or complicated for people and issues that may deter people from volunteering. Such issues include: Volunteering opportunities are usually held by various different organisations and such opportunities usually require directly contacting them. Hence it is troublesome to search for a volunteering opportunity for the average joe as they have to contact multiple organisations to check if they have availability in their volunteer positions. People may be deterred from volunteering without friends or people they know going along with them. As volunteering in general has no incentives, people are less willing to spend time volunteering. Students have to navigate and find opportunities that the school accepts as a VIA hour activity, and even when they find a suitable activity, there are usually issues with organisations certifying their hours to the school through certificates or documents.

Afterwards, we set about to think up strategies to tackle the problems we have listed. Initially our idea was a site that simply collates volunteering opportunities, but we believed we could build on the idea to be a better fit for the problem. These are our ideas after rounds of brainstorming: A platform that collates volunteering opportunities into a centralised location where potential volunteers are able to browse through available activities and sign up for them. The platform will allow them to contact and follow like minded people who share similar interests and are looking to volunteer for similar activities. A point system where volunteers will earn the user points, which they can then redeem for vouchers and benefits. The validity for VIA hours will be indicated within the opportunities, alongside with ability to print a pdf certificate to indicate the hours spent volunteering

After the ideation phase, we set out to build a wireframe of the hack. Firstly, we used Figma to create the wireframe. We made various pages of the app with the features we intend to put inside, including an events page listing the available volunteer opportunities, the profile page, and a history page. Then we linked the pages together with on click navigations.

After the wireframing, we had a better idea of how the app was supposed to look, and we started on coding it in React with the wireframe as reference. While doing so, we started on the Telegram bot as well. In the middle of the development, we continuously tested the Telegram bot and tried accessing the webpage created using React as we made changes and implemented the key features of the hack.

Throughout the development of the hack, we used Git as a collaborative tool and as a version control for the hack. The use of Git allowed multiple of us to work on different parts of the project at the same time, be it the Telegram bot, React webpage or the README.md of the hack and keep track of changes throughout the development.

What are some difficulties you overcame?

One of the difficulties that we have to overcome is definitely the tight timeframe we are given. With only a day for ideation, wireframing and prototyping, we had to make haste. We certainly wished we had more time to consider more ideas during the ideation phase, but doing so will compromise the time allowance for the wireframing and implementation of our hack. But in the end, we are satisfied with what we managed to come up with as we feel that it had tackled all the issues we have listed out that potential volunteers face.

We had difficulty in the need to adopt a new technology as well. While implementing the Telegram bot, we had to learn how to have it generate a pdf file for the certification purpose. The learning of its API took a while, but after a few experiments and reading the documentation, we were able to get the python script to create a pdf file.

What was your biggest learning point from LifeHack 2022?

Our biggest learning point from LifeHack 2022 is how we work under tight time constraints. With only 24 hours to work on creating a prototype based off of a problem statement, we have to be able to think on our feets and quickly come up with an idea and then implement a prototype of it. Through this time constraint, we have to delegate our tasks effectively and manage our time such that we are able to accomplish the requirements as soon as possible.

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