Each month over 350,000 children are helped by diaper banks, forgoing their parents having to make the difficult choice of choosing between feeding their children and putting diapers on them. There are diaper banks in 44 states and they provide about 4 million diapers a month to needy families. We're going to be using the SaaS that we built last year, making it more robust, and polishing it off to be demoed at the National Diaperbank Network conference later this year. Our goal is for this one to be the best Inventory management product available at the lowest (or "no") cost to diaperbanks. We will be working in tandem with PartnerBase, which is a CRM for Community Partners that will work with the Diaperbanks to handle distribution / order fulfillment /family interaction.
- Github: https://github.com/orgs/rubyforgood/teams/diaper/repositories
- Slack channel: #diaper
Diaper Partner is a CRM tool designed to help diaper bank partners get diapers to those in need efficiently. Diaper partners are the public facing side of the diaper bank pipeline. As such, diaper partners need an effective way to track diapers from diaper bank all the way through to child recipient and be able to report back to diaper banks.
We’ll be building a multi-tenant system to allow approved diaper bank partners to track their clients (children), fill diaper orders, distribute diaper donations, and report on crucial data points. Diaper Partner will work in tandem with DiaperBase to complement its diaper bank inventory tracking and order fullfillment system via APIs.
We're lucky to have Megan Fischer with us as our on-site stakeholder and diaper bank guru this year. She runs the Sweet Cheeks Diaper Bank (SCDB) in Cincinnati, OH. SCDB is also a member of the National Diaper Bank Network. Megan started SCDB in late 2015 and has grown to distributing over 50K diapers per month.
We'll be partnering with Sweet Cheeks Diaper Bank as well as PDX Diaper Bank to test our Diaper Partner system.
- GitHub https://github.com/orgs/rubyforgood/teams/diaper-partner/repositories
- Slack channel: #diaper-partner
The New Sanctuary Coalition is a network of congregations, organizations, and individuals standing publicly in solidarity with families and communities resisting detention and deportation. NSC's accompaniment program pairs undocumented people with a group of trained volunteers to accompany them to their immigration hearings and check-ins with ICE. NSC holds pro-se clinics, where undocumented people work with trained volunteers and lawyers to prepare documents (asylum applications, juvenile visas, etc.) to fight their immigration case. NSC works with detained immigrants across the US and their families to fight for their release. We'll be working on the internal database software that facilitates these (and more) NSC programs and allows them to operate at increasing scale.
- GitHub https://github.com/orgs/rubyforgood/teams/new-sanctuary/repositories
- Slack: #new-sanctuary
Namati is an organization that is building a global network of grassroots legal advocates. These advocates work to empower citizens to "understand, use, and shape the law." Namati uses Discourse as a main software platform for organizing this movement. Work with us during Ruby For Good to both improve an existing Discourse plugin and to build a new plugin. The new plugin will allow Namati to use Discourse as a ticketing system, ensuring that people get the help they need.
- GitHub https://github.com/orgs/rubyforgood/teams/namati/repositories
- Slack: #namati
A functioning democracy requires an engaged citizenry. Our stakeholder, Demand Progress is focused on Internet Freedom, Open Government and Financial Reform. In order to hold government accountable they must keep track of shifting legislative schedules and content.
It is difficult to follow when Congress has scheduled a committee/subcommittee hearing/meeting without a paid subscription to a news service that gathers this info.
The Senate and House release meeting notices online in structured data formats, but there’s no well-designed publicly-available central place to see all the notices from the different committees or subcommittees.
The Demand Progress team will build a user-friendly web based calendar for congressional hearings and markups. With one click users will be able to add these events to their own calendar. If time allows we will have a couple other stretch goals requested by our stakeholder including a tool for converting PDF's of pre-introduction legislation to plain text and/or a tool for parsing organizational sign-on lists for letters of support.
- Github https://github.com/orgs/rubyforgood/teams/demand-progress/repositories
- slack: #demand-progress
Applied Conservation provides consulting and facilitation services to public agencies, nonprofit conservation organizations, private landowners and other partners in conservation action planning, landscape conservation forecasting, and conservation strategy implementation. It was founded by Greg Low, a long term employee of the Nature Conservatory and enthusiastic advocate for nature conservation.
Greg's life work has been dedicated towards the development and refinement of Conservation Action Planning (CAP)-- a process for identifying and measuring the effectiveness of environmental conservation strategies. CAP was codified into an application that melded Excel and Visual Basic to provide a somewhat automated way of planning, implementing and measuring success for large landscapes and other conservation projects.
The goal of this project is to build a software product that will "democratize" the use of CAP for environmental protection. The complexity and lack of user-friendly, intuitive design of current CAP software means that the CAP process is not accessible to people who have not been extensively trained by experts like Greg. We will be building a web-based application that will direct users to provide accurate data input, then use those inputs to provide an accurate and useful model/scorecard of effectiveness of conservation efforts.
This project will likely involve a lot of complex back-end logic to produce the scorecard and may involve a somewhat unlikely level of front-end effort for the gathering of user inputs.
- Github: https://github.com/orgs/rubyforgood/teams/applied-conservation/repositories
- Slack: #applied-conservation
Cartouche is a Docker/docker-compose based wrapper around the OpenStreetMap.com web stack, designed to make it easy for developers to get up and running for local development. It incorporates several core OSM libraries as Git submodules, which allows for direct contribution of features and enhancements directly to their upstream (parent) projects.
The projects currently included in this stack are: cgimap, libpgosm, openstreetmap-website, and osmosis.
Issues in this project span from beginner-friendly work on documentation and configuration options all the way up to performance tweaking of importing a map of the entire planet.
- Github: https://github.com/orgs/rubyforgood/teams/cartouche/repositories
- Slack: #cartouche
OpenStreetMap emphasizes local knowledge. Contributors use aerial imagery, GPS devices, and low-tech field maps to verify that OSM is accurate and up to date. OpenStreetMap's community is diverse, passionate, and growing every day. Our contributors include enthusiast mappers, GIS professionals, engineers running the OSM servers, humanitarians mapping disaster-affected areas, and many more. We will be restructuring the authentication and authorization system, addressing various beginner-friendly issues, and possibly digging into some Ruby <-> C bindings!
- Github: https://github.com/orgs/rubyforgood/teams/openstreetmap/repositories
- Slack: #openstreetmap
Indigenous people have lived in the Amazon rainforest in South America for thousands of years, and continue to do so today. Nearly two-fifth of the Amazon region is settled by indigenous and other traditional communities, who live sustainably off the forest and its natural resources. Many of today’s communities have lived in their territories for centuries, and have an intimate relationship with their ancestral lands. Community members share a richly detailed knowledge about places like sacred, spiritual and historical sites, which can count up to hundreds in number and comprise an incredible geography central to the communities’ collective identity. But this traditional knowledge is primarily transmitted orally, and in the contemporary era is at risk of disappearing forever. To prevent this from happening, the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) is partnering with the indigenous people of the Amazon to map their lands and record oral history storytelling. ACT is training youth to use mapping technologies and interview their elders so they can preserve their cultural and historical legacy for future generations to come. Using the latest tools in web mapping, we can visualize these recordings by placing them on an interactive map. However, in order to bring this back to the communities in the rainforest, we need a geostorytelling portal that can function entirely in an offline setting. At Ruby for Good 2018, help ACT develop a custom mapping CMS powered by Mapbox, called TerraStories. ACT will use TerraStories for its active oral histories projects with partner communities, but the application will be entirely open source and shared with any community who wants to document their own place-based storytelling.
- Github: https://github.com/orgs/rubyforgood/teams/amazon-conservation/repositories
- Slack: #amazon-conservation
Did you know that legislators have little visibility into their own data, including bill text or discussion meeting invitations? Those hand-scrawled addendums we heard about recently are not an anomaly.
What if legislators could more visibility into their own data? What if they could act and collaborate based on what they hear from each other? What if they could make decisions backed by this data?
Let’s help them take their first steps. Our stakeholder, the Resilient Democracy Coalition, wants to put non-partisan tools for data visibility into the hands of legislators and their staff, and inspire them to harness the power of data in their everyday work.
The legislative and executive branches communicate with each other through the Federal Register, but there’s no way for a representative’s staff to quickly be notified of events of interest to that representative. Just because a representative cares about an issue doesn’t mean they’re able to hear about relevant actions or events concerning that issue.
The Resilient Democracy team will create a push notification system for staffers to use, so they can learn when a meeting or memo of interest is published in the Federal Register.
- Github: https://github.com/orgs/rubyforgood/teams/resilient-democracy/repositories
- Slack: #resilient-democracy