Objectives of the service
In “Hand for U” the central concept is the Help Request and Help Offer. Help Requests can be sent by Person in Need and then chosen by Volunteer verified by the Organisation (the functionalities showed with green arrows). This process appears from the other side, too. Volunteers can also post their help offers which can be accessed by People in need. The history of both Volunteer and Person in Need will be easily accessible by Organisation through web-panel. This way the interaction between Person in Need and Volunteer takes place in a safer environment. After the interaction between Volunteer and Person in Need, Person in Need will have a possibility to rate the help they received, which will allow Organisation to collect feedback as well as knowledge of how to improve their activities. Furthermore, the Organisation will be able to post about events they are organising so the non-registered and registered Volunteers can join them. The Project Team created a safe space that allow helping each other communities to grow. The application heavily relies on the location, which helps in getting help quicker.
Users and their needs
The solution is dedicated to three groups:
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Volunteering Organisations which can expand their activities and supervise the interactions between People in Need and Volunteers. Moreover, Organisation can benefit from the data collected in the application, i.e. most frequent categories of requests, areas of People in Need and Volunteers’ activity etc.,
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People in Need who can seek help from people nearby, utilising functionalities of assessing the help they need and rating the received help,
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Volunteers who can offer their help to those who need it most and act on behalf of the Volunteering Organisation.
In “Hand for U” the Project Team wishes to create a space for self-organising between Volunteers and People in Need and allow Organisations to provide supervision over their interactions. The targeted users will be located in Poland, however the Project Team plans to broaden the scope of targeted users.
Service/ system concept
The main functionality in “Hand for U” is Creation of a Request, dedicated to Person in Need. Through this process the user can specify what kind of help they need and provide necessary details that will be visible to the Volunteers. Besides that, Person in Need will see the Help Offers provided by Volunteers and Organisations. Volunteers with validated accounts, will have access to the functionalities like list of active requests and the possibility to accept the request.
Besides the mobile application, web-based management panel is added as well. From the perspective of the organisation, there are two roles. The first one, Organisation, provides the description of the organisation profile visible to all application users, defines Area(s) in which the organisation operates and creates Coordination accounts. Coordinators, on the other hand, are responsible for validation of volunteer accounts that are created in the Area(s) maintained by them. Besides that, they review rates in order to mitigate service misuse.
On the image below all of the main functionalities of the app and web panel are presented with their respective recipients (several functionalities, like verification of Person in Need and translation of requests will be available in future versions of the application).
Space Added Value
The main “space” solution to be used in “Hand for U” stands behind the feature of an exact localisation determination of a person in need as well as of a volunteer of an organisation. The feature utilises GNSS services provided by mobile devices and supporting satellite navigation Galileo, so it can be exploited both on a local scale (community, district, city) as well as on a global scale (country). The exact localisation is crucial to provide a person in need (refugee) assistance by volunteers and organisations that are close and could react fast.
Current Status
Three releases of the application have been completed. The first one focuses on functionalities for the Organisation, the second one focuses on the path of Volunteer and the final version focuses on People in Need. Application is available for both Android and iOS. The web-panel has been completed, is available under the link https://www.handforu.itti.com.pl and offers the following functionalities:
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Registering as an organisation
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Invitation of coordinators, accompanied by the defining their help locations
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Managing the list of volunteers
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Managing the list of people in need
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Creating the events
Prime Contractor(s)
