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Show HN: VETS – Volunteer Effort Tracking System

14 points| ceeekay | 11 years ago | reply

About 5 years ago I volunteered to help our local SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) build a computerized system for tracking hours that their volunteers spent. This an important part of the volunteer coordinator's job, as there are hours/year requirements for volunteers, awards given out annually, etc. Prior to that they were using a paper binder with sign-in sheets, and adding up everything by hand at the end of the month. With about 1000 active volunteers, this was no small task, and seemed like a place computerization would be an amazing help. I wrote up a simple system in Rails (which I had spent a fair amount of hobby time with) and it's been running there ever since.

Today, there are about 67,000 "hours" entries in the database, about about 3,000 volunteers (1/3 of them active), and the system is a little slower than it ought to be (my original testing was with tens of records, since there was no existing database to import). Rather than try to update and re-learn ruby and rails, I opted to give a try porting the essential parts of the system to Python using bottle.py

The result of my work is now up at https://github.com/vets/vets and licensed under MIT.

I'm at a point where things are about functionally complete and I'd love to hear feedback from anyone willing to take the time to take a look at it. It's a generic enough system that I could see other non-profit organizations (who often have much/any money available to spend on commercial software that can track things like this) being interesting in this.

Things I'm not that great at, which are incidentally the main things this project uses:

* Python * bottle.py * SQL * HTML/CSS

This is a hobby project for me (I'm a C programmer by day) so I am probably taking a naive approach in most cases, but in some cases I know that when I re-deploy this version of the system, it's likely to sit for another 5+ years.

8 comments

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[+] patrickgokey|11 years ago|reply
I have been putting together a list of software to look at for a tech-based activism/volunteerism site I'm working on. This looks like it could be very useful and I'm looking forward to checking it out this weekend. Thanks for this!
[+] chrmaury|11 years ago|reply
Have you published this list yet? I'd be very interested to take a look.
[+] smt88|11 years ago|reply
Please let me know the URL as well.
[+] samstave|11 years ago|reply
Need a foursquare for volunteer projects: Check-in that youre here doing X (with GPS checkin, as needed)