Shiva is a platform whose goal is allowing flexible means to help people. It is based on the concept of Tickets, when one needs help it creates a ticket, when one wanna help it creates a ticket.

A ticket maps to some available or missing resource, it can be utilities, clothes, food or even folks who are offering shelter.

When a new ticket is created then it performs a matching criteria among existing tickets. Ticket owners will get notified according to their ticket's attributes like country, state, city, ticket type, resource type etc.

When a ticket is created then an E-mail is sent to the ticket's author to validate the ticket it comes with a deletion and avoid expiration link that is used to remove the ticket later.

The rationale to not demand a login mechanism consists of the fact that people who are in need of basic resources to survive are unlikely to have access to a device with internet nor an E-mail account.

The actual approach of having validation/deletion links for tickets it allows third parties to ask for help on one behalf with simplicity.

Note: There is a version running at https://shi-va.herokuapp.com/ That is not meant to be usable since it runs on a free heroku account.

Debug

First set up a virtualenv.

cd ~/.virtualenvs/
virtualenv shiva -p python

Install Shiva requirements.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Fill E-mail backend attributes in shiva/settings.py.

# The site domain.
SITE_ADDRESS = 'http://0.0.0.0:8000'

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.gmail.com'
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_HOST_USER = ''
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = ''

# If you aren't using something like sendgrid single sender verification
# then EMAIL_FROM = EMAIL_HOST_USER = SERVER_EMAIL
EMAIL_FROM = ''
SERVER_EMAIL = ''

Get Google Capitcha keys and fill the following attributes in shiva/settings.py.

https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/intro

Note: You should add http://0.0.0.0:8000 in your Google Capitcha domain to allow it working when in debug mode on port 8000.

# For debugging on 0.0.0.0.
RECAPTCHA_PUBLIC_KEY = ''
RECAPTCHA_PRIVATE_KEY = ''

Set your site admins with:

ADMINS = [('Yourname', 'Youremail')]

That attribute defines who will get notified when tickets are reported. It works only when DEBUG = False.

Migrate with.

python manage.py migrate

Run the script below to create Django Admin Superusers.

./create-superusers

Run it like:

cd ~/projects/shiva-code
stdbuf -o 0 python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

After that you should be able to access Shiva on.

http://0.0.0.0:8000

Note: You should have the attribute below in your settings.py in order to run tests. It is to bypass google captcha.

NOCAPTCHA = True

Tickets usually will have an expiration date unless it is meant to be permanent. That feature will be implemented yet. There is a ticket_app/management/commands/run_expiration command to check ticket expiration. You could run it with a cron job.

There is a mechanism of reporting tickets, when a ticket is reported then an E-mail is sent to all django site admins.

Next Step

The next steps would be getting people interested to test, contribute with ideas and mostly translation for other languages.

Credits

I came accross the goal of this project when i met Cara Arellano (cara.arellano@berkeley.edu). She invited me to participate in a project to help India to recover from COVID-19 issues.

I was told the project was the creation of a platform to simplify the process of finding available resources for donnation. I liked the project goal and i decided to work on Shiva's specification.