What is JoatU?
JoatU (Jack of all trades Universe) is a platform for incentivizing hyperlocal community action and getting to know your neighbors. There are two halves to this: projects and trades.
For example, the members of a community may want to plant a community garden. Someone creates a project and requests volunteers. At a certain place and time, the people come together and do whatever action is needed. All participants are then rewarded in CAPS: Community Action Points which are automatically generated from project work. Initially 1 hour of work = 15 CAPS.
What can you do with CAPS? This is where the trades come in: people can post requests for things they need and offers for things they have. For example, I might be able to shovel a sidewalk and so I offer to do this for 5 CAPS (this amount does not need to match the same 1:15 ratio for projects). Or I might want help with a problem on my computer, so I offer 20 CAPS to anyone who can resolve the problem.
JoatU is under active development with a full-time team in the D3 program in Montreal. JoatU also won the Desjardins Smart Cities challenge in 2017. The team is currently making connections with the City of Montreal and various locations within the city to function as community hubs.
But although the team is based in Montreal, the project itself is both global and hyperlocal. This means that anyone can contribute, anyone can create hubs, and anyone can be part of the community. We welcome anyone who is interested to contribute to the project!
What is currently available?
The development build can be found here.
Some basic functionality has been completed, but with no thought (yet!) to design:
- Create Projects, Requests, and Offers
- Volunteer for projects, with manual approval directly in database
- Donate CAPS
- Private chat, public commenting
- Authentication with username / password or Facebook
Technology Stack
JoatU is built on React and Redux, connecting to Firebase using Cloud Firestore. We use Prettier to ensure a consistent coding style.
Other important libraries:
- Material-UI React widgets using Material Design
- React Router React navigation
- Ramda We love functional programming!
- redux-orm Handles the relations between objects in Redux
- Formik Simplify forms with React
- Mapbox GL JS Display and manipulate maps
- Create React App JoatU was created with this, and since we have not ejected, still is useful for understanding configuration
- Yarn We use Yarn instead of NPM for package management
Roadmap
Work is managed via Waffle.io. All the items in the "To Do" column are the most important.
We need big features!
- Community hubs can approve / reject projects to ensure only legit projects are available
- Screens for approve / reject volunteers as well (currently need to update the database directly)
- A workflow for matching offers and requests and exchanging CAPs
We need small features!
- Tapping logo should bring you back to home page
- Chats with all people should be in a single screen
- Requests and offers should contain CAPs amount
We also need design! I have been focusing on creating components rather than visual design or UX. It would be amazing for someone to do both a) visual UI work on any components, and b) UX design for the entire flow.
How to contribute?
We have a gitter channel where I will be an active participant. I am immediately notified for all github comments and issues, so this is also a good way to discuss a specific issue. If you see the value of a new issue, then those are welcome as well! Finally, I can be reached directly via LinkedIn.
At the moment, the issues in github need more detail, and I will be actively cleaning those up in the next couple days to make it easier for more people to contribute. In the meanwhile, don't hesitate to reach out in whatever way works best for you.
Thank you for reading this post, and we look forward to working with each and every one one of you!<3
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors