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Unter

(Note: the "for public consumption" name is the Migrant Volunteer Coordinating Assistant.)

Unter is a pun on "Uber". Originally it occurred to me that a free ride-hailing service would be really useful in El Paso for getting migrants to their transit points (airport, bus station), so the name was obvious - "unter" == "under", under the bridge, underclass, under-served, under-appreciated. But we need to do more than ride-sharing: we need volunteer coordinators to be able to signal events, to know which volunteers are available at which times, and to access various other kinds of resources than rides (such as interpreters).

This will start as a pure web app that:

• Allows volunteers to register and indicate their availability windows (times and durations).
• Allows volunteer coordinators to see available volunteers for given time periods.
• Allows volunteers coordinators to signal "need events" (eg: "Ride to airport for 3 individuals from La Quinta to be delivered by 10:15 AM").
• Matches need events with available volunteers and alerts those volunteers via email or text.
• Allows volunteers to commit to respond to a need event by clicking a link.
• Allows volunteer coordinators to see which volunteers have responded to need events.
• Future work:
  • An Android app that polls for relevant events and issues alerts on the phone.
  • iOS too.
  • Track volunteer progress - are they actually coming and if so, where are they now?
  • Be as smart as possible about computing which volunteers are "available" for particular need events - eg we don't want to alert a user for an event starting in 15 minutes if we know it will take them 30 minutes to drive to the location.

Development

The webapp is built on TurboGears 2.4 using Python 3.7 (actually Python 3.4 or better should be OK). TurboGears is a fairly standard "batteries included" kind of Python web framework, similar to Flask. Visit http://www.turbogears.org for docs.

To work on the web app, you need to install virtualenv:

pip install virtualenv

and then set up a Python 3 virtual environment:

virtualenv -p /path/to/your/python3.exe ./python3-venv

Then activate the virtual environment:

. ./python3-venv/bin/activate

Then install Unter's dependencies:

cd path/to/your/unter/checkout/src/tg/unter
pip install --pre turbogears
pip install tg.devtools
python setup.py develop
gearbox setup-app
gearbox serve

Now you should have an Unter server running on port 8080.

The primary functionality is implemented in src/tg/unter/unter/controllers/root.py. I've also split off some utility code in additional files in the controllers/ directory. Those files don't implement TurboGears controllers, they are just buckets to organize code that root.py uses.

The DB model is in src/tg/unter/unter/model. It uses SQLAlchemy as the object-relational mapper.