MyHelpMe

MyHelpMe (draft logo)

Inspiration

How many times walking back home or looking out of the window, we have been attracted by the lights coming from neighbors’ houses and the curiosity to know their life, their background, and their habits. In these days of lockdown and mobility restrictions, more than ever, we wonder how people living next to us are keeping up with the daily routine, if they might need help or how we could help them.

MyHelpMe is a platform addressed to people living in the same neighborhood that connects volunteers and those in need of help. Young or in good condition people living in the area can help vulnerable neighbors or old people whose sons live out of the city and need help with grocery, buying medicament, or go run an errand. MyHelpMe can be used also as a smart way to reduce mobility and contain the virus spread with a unique volunteer consolidating orders from multiple neighbors and deliver at their door.

Especially because we want to address people in need that do not necessarily know or can use a smartphone, MyHelpMe collects requests also coming from a text message or a phone call to a dedicated number!

If in normal circumstances smartphones apps and social media risk for isolating users from real-world connection, at this moment where self-isolation and social distance are imposed, MyHelpMe it’s an attempt to bring people together to help each other while complying with current restrictions. MyHelpMe becomes an opportunity for common people to do uncommon things and demonstrate that together we can be stronger.

We are optimistic that the connections created online today will be the starting point for living offline experiences with our local community as well in the very next future!

What it does

MyHelpMe is a website that gives you the change to ask for help or provide your help to other users leaving in the same area as yours. To someone who wants to ask for help, MyHelpMe proposes a list of pre-defined options such as: grocery, pharmacy, post-office, or other. The user can choose one of these options and provide an optional description. You can share your data to be contacted between Email, Mobile, Messenger, WhatsApp, or live chat. Viceversa, to someone who wants to help, MyHelpMe shows the vacant requests for help and the user can pick the one that best suits his/hers availability and connect with the helpee. One of the key features of MyHelpMe is that is suitable for both people owning a smartphone and knowing how to use it and people with a simple phone. People in need can text or directly call the dedicated phone number available in their country to ask for generic help. They just have to send their postal code. Such a request appears in the system as something like "Call needed", to communicate to the volunteers that this helpee needs to be called.

How we built it

For simplicity, we started with a website, but it can be made available in form of mobile application too. The backend is a Django server which has been deployed in Google cloud.

Challenges we ran into

We encountered many challenges since the very beginning. Firstly, we started with a vague idea to build something to connect people who can help with easy tasks and people who are in need, but do not necessarily have a smartphone or know how to use it. We had to polish the idea to come up with something that looks like what is shown in the video. Then we had to choose the right technologies and find a good balance between having something up and running within three days and building something that could go to production. Lastly, for the moment, we had to build a video without any prior knowledge of any mock-up tools.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We managed to put something in place within three days that could be developed with more time investment and could contribute to make people life easier during this hard time.

What we learned

Thanks to the diversified base knowledge of the team members, we shared knowledge about how to deploy with Google cloud, the basics of django, how to make a mock-up of a website with balsamiq and how to upload a video on youtube (that's right, I'm a software engineer and a noob with youtube)

What's next for MyHelpMe

The project has just been started. First, the UI needs to be improved and tested further until the flow are the easiest possible for the users. The backend needs to be brought up to a stage where it's functional so that a second phase of testing can begin. Furthermore, some investigation needs to be done on how to connect a bot that collects requests coming from a phone number and writes them in the DB. Quite some work to come :)