People
Voluntari.ly is setup as a programme under the Pam Fergusson Resources Trust (PFRT). The core team consists of Andrew Watkins as Product Lead (50%) and Walter Lim as Design Lead (100%). Both joined the team in late January.
The team relies on volunteer effort in the form of developer contributors. These include:
Completed onboarding:
- Anne Bilek
- Jasmine Kamante
Currently onboarding:
- Eteroa Lafaele
- Kayla Allison
- Heba Farooq
In addition we have two University of Auckland students supporting the application as part of their year 4 projects.
- Darcy Cox
- Cyrus Raitava-Kumar
We continue to expand the contributor base.
On 4th May is planned a working bee day at Datacom where we will work with a group of staff taking the project forward – particularly in respect of cloud deployment and allowing volunteers to sign into the application using their corporate credentials.
Later in May we plan with Auckland University a weekend of code that will introduce 40+ masters students to the project.
Our goal is to have 5-10 regular contributors supporting the development over the next few months coupled with bursts of work from hackathons and days of code using a wider group of volunteers.
Processes & Tools
In February an initial technical advisory group met to discuss the options for the software stack to use to build the application. It was agreed to use a common modern stack consisting of MongoDB, Express, React and Node (MERN). This provides us with a single language (javascript) from front to back coupled with a framework supporting a layered pattern of service APIs and Component based web application. All the components are open source and have no licencing costs.
The voluntarily application will also be open source using the Mozilla Public License 2.0. Being open source is a key requirement for us to make use of volunteer contributors to the project.
The complete development system is available on Github at https://github.com/voluntarily/vly1
In addition as an Open Source project we have been provided with a free licence to use Atlassian software tools : Confluence – Documentation Wiki, and JIRA – issue tracking system. These are available at: https://voluntarily.atlassian.net
We now have a basic process for onboarding volunteer developer contributors which includes a brief overview of the project, introduction to the code base and an initial task to accomplish.
The road map, major functions, and individual feature task have been placed into the Jira project. https://voluntarily.atlassian.net/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=2&projectKey=VP
Developer documentation, architecture, design, processes etc are all in the wiki
https://voluntarily.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/VP/overview
Visual Design and Customer Experience
Consultation on the functionality required and patterns of use started with a Hackfest in Dec 2018 that outlined the core problems we wish to solve, personas for key stakeholders: volunteers, teachers, corporates, agencies etc. Along with a range of use case scenarios. These gave us our outline functional design and requirements list.
Walter has created designs for the way the application will look and work on the screen. These have been tested with likely users to help us improve the operation and flow, language etc.
The design has evolved since in consultation with teachers and others through multiple school meetings. [list?]
[Point to example screen shots.]
Product
Diversity
The Voluntari.ly application has been designed to be multi-lingual from the start. It will launch in English and Māori.
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