Unifire (Canvass/Phonebank Shift Management)

[pixelpax]

About the group

(Come join us at #unifire if you have any questions!)

Progressive campaigns tend to be relatively flat hierarchies, and organizational bandwidth often becomes a scarce resource. Unfire will confront this problem by automating and optimizing the management of volunteer shifts.

The output of this endeavor will be:

• A mobile, cross-platform, client app for volunteers
• “Campaign Cluster” a collection of services to manage dispatch systems for a single campaign
• An administrative web-portal to allow organizers to configure the above cluster
• An online monitored/maintained registry service for campaigns and user accounts

Here's an idea of what the experience of this product looks like...

Imagine walking into a field office to volunteer. Instead of a paper list of addresses and check-boxes, the field organizer installs an app on your phone that trains you quickly, lets you enter data, take donations, and get your routes. You knock on doors, finish up, leave the office and head back to your rural homestead 2 hours away from the campaign HQ. The next day, you have a little free time to volunteer, but there’s no field office in your area. Log onto the App and tell it: "I have 1.5 hours to canvass today; I have a car; I don’t want to drive further than 2 miles away from my home." Boom. App delegates a route to you that's been enqueued by a statewide organizer and you're out canvassing in minutes without any organizational overhead.

You have so much fun, that you log on again and set an event pinned at your house, an open invitation for anyone who would like to phonebank with you this evening. A couple folks from nearby towns come by and try out phonebanking for the first time with you. You order Thai food together, joke about strange calls and gaffs, exchange tips, and all go get a beer together after it’s done.

The next week, your local election is finished (won by a landslide of course!), but you get a notification on Unifire that Hawaii's progressive gubernatorial candidate is behind by a nose. Oh snap! Log on, train yourself in the campaign rhetoric, and start burning through a newly delegated call list within minutes.

Thanks for all your help, volunteer, you've earned oodles of points and really helped us out! Our campaigns will be mailing you a beer koozie, shirts, a spatula for all your hard work!

(Note that some of the implied features are stretch goals, and may not make it into first release. I include them to show the potential utility of such an application to campaigns, organizers and volunteers.)

Who we're looking for

Anyone who wants to see this become a reality. If you have experience with any of the tools in the next section, great! If you don't, this is a good project to get started with. I would be happy to help you with any aspect of the developer setup and point you to resources for learning these tools. Please do not feel as if your skill level with any of the listed tools limits you from contributing!

This project is young and there are opportunities for ownership of large sections of the product depending on one's level of commitment. Ad-hoc contributions and architectural/conceptual suggestions are needed too!

Tools

• TypeScript
• React
• React-Native
• NodeJS/Express
• PostgreSQL/PostGIS
• Docker
• Redux
• GeoServer
• Asterisk

[PamelaJohn]

Hey @pixelpax, I hope you're well! We've had some recent volunteer inquiries about helping with Unifire. What is the best way to reach out to you?