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Organization Profile
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Organization Signup
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Home Page
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Donation Page
Inspiration
We've seen a lot of ad-hoc sites or community efforts arise as our city has gone under shelter-in-place due to Covid-19. Amongst these are calls from local hospitals or shelters for supplies that they are desperately in need of, and an overwhelming amount of support from people in the community who can provide help and donations. However, since these efforts are spread all over the place - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. - we wanted to build a centralized place for those who can help to connect with those who need help. In scary and uncertain times, we should always keep an eye out for the helpers.
What it does
Port.er is a website that serves two audiences - organizations who can request donations, and people who can make donations. Through the site, an organization can sign up and list what supplies they need, and general donation pickup/dropoff information. People interested in donating can enter the site, filter by orgs in need that are close to them by zipcode, and schedule times to donate the items that an organization is interested in. The organization can keep track of when donations are supposed to come through and edit their requests via their profile.
How we built it
We built this app on a Python Django backend, with Create React App using Material UI to style on the frontend. The plan is to deploy it on Heroku (this is still in the works at the moment).
Challenges we ran into
Most of the team was unfamiliar with one or the other side of the codebase - some of us had never used Django and got frustrated with the documentation, others struggled with how deployment worked, and we of course ran into merge conflicts. As time got closer to the deadline, we ran into a good deal of bugs that we rapidly debugged together until we got a working prototype up to demo.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Working together effectively as a team. We were able to split up all the work and balance out each others' strengths and weaknesses. Despite running into many roadblocks on the way, and many many hours of staring at the computer screen, we're so proud of having a working prototype up.
What we learned
How to get a working application up and running from scratch. How to add authentication into our application. How to effectively interact between the backend and frontend. How to weigh design implications and coding implications.
What's next for Port.er
There's a lot left for us to do! Our designs reflect way more than what our current prototype has. We still need to add more options for filtering, a better and more fleshed out profile for organizations, possibly even the ability to have people volunteer to bring donations back and forth between organizations and donators. However, we strongly believe that there is a use case for our application, and are excited for San Francisco to see it.
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