Hi everyone... We hope you’re doing ok and staying safe during these difficult times…
During ‘Lock-down’ the team at South West London TV created a free web app you can use on your computer or smart phone which we hope will get some community spirit going and make it easy for local people to help each other.
It’s called What Goes Around Comes Around (WGACA) and it’s a tool for sharing and swapping food and drink, household goods, and over-the-counter medicines with those in need.
You can post Offers of surplus items you’re able to share:
You can post a Request to let people know you need urgent help:
You can review Matches (which are detected automatically) and volunteer as a Runner to pick up nearby Offers:
You can review your Deliveries and plan the best route:
It’s early days and we’re already working on a load of improvements to the app (mainly to protect against scammers and selfish misuse), but we wanted to start sharing it ASAP so that trusted people in the area can start helping each other.
If it proves popular, my intention is to make the app and the data available to other charities (e.g. food banks), community groups, emergency services and other agencies who are better placed to manage logistics/distribution using the tool.
• Python 3.7 - because it’s all I know and I’m planning to have to make this happen on my own if necessary.
• Anvil.Works - because I don’t have time to learn and deploy a scalable web app with database, user authentication, email, and (nice to have) google maps integration and this seems like a fast route to getting something “out there” quickly.
That’s all - as few layers/dependencies as possible.
FYI I did consider setting up a simple discussion forum where people could interact with their offers/requests and may still do so for the social aspects of this but believe an app is better because the data can them be standardised, both for sharing with other charities/volunteers/government support teams and for down-stream automation (e.g. calculating optimum pick-up and drop-off delivery routes for volunteer drivers/walkers).