Current Covaid Organizations UI
Covaid Organizations is a web platform that allows mutual aid organizations to manage and delegate their volunteers efficiently. Currently, most mutual aid organizations rely on platforms such as Google Sheets and Google Forms to manage their internal operations. While Google and other companies offers generalized products for almost any use case, these general features do not scale well to large and more complex mutual aid organizations. Ultimately, Covaid aims to streamline internal operations and give time back to mutual aid organizers to continue supporting their local communities.
Covaid Organizations is used by two main groups: Covaid's internal team and external mutual aid organizations. When a request is received on Covaid, the request is either sent to the Covaid internal team or an external organization based on the location of the request. The internal team exists to handle any request that doesn't lie in the region of an existing mutual aid organization. These requests go through the same lifecycle as all other requests but are exclusively managed by internally by Covaid.
The goal of request matching is to efficiently find a volunteer that can support a requester in need. Within the organization portal, there are 3 main statuses that display all unmatched, matched, and completed requests for an organization. Requests are associated with an organization based on the location of the request. Any update made to the requests are updated live on all other clients that are logged by using the pusher-js package. Requests are displayed row-wise within each tab and can be sorted and filtered by the following options:
Organization requests (unmatched)
An organization's requests can also be visualized using the organization map. Since each request has a corresponding latitude and longitude, its location can easily be pinned. Requests are color coded by status (unmatched, matched, completed) when placed on the map; the above example displaying unmatched requests. The map visualization is created using the Mapbox API and the react-map-gl package. Volunteers can also be displayed alongside requests by using their location attributes.
Note: All attributes of a request can be modified from within the organization portal. Some commonly edited attributes include the requester's location, tasks, and details. These may be edited to more accurately reflect the current state of the request.
Request Lifecycle within Organizations
Unmatched Requests ■
When a user creates a request, that request is given the unmatched status and is displayed under the first unmatched tab. To begin with the request matching process, an admin must first mark themselves as tracking the request. The admin may also add notes to the request for storing any relevant information about that request. Now, the request is ready to be matched to nearby volunteers. When matching volunteers to a request, volunteers are displayed in sorted order by distance to requester. There is also option to select whether to match the requester and volunteers by resource task (Ex. Food, Groceries, etc.). Once the volunteers have been chosen and confirmed, the request is then sent to the portal of all selected volunteers. Admins also have the option to manually complete a request and avoid the volunteer matching process.