Request for Assistance with Humanitarian Venture for Iraq
Posted: Thu Nov 02, 2006 12:26 am
To whom this may concern--
I am a rising senior at Harvard taking a leave of absence to start a venture to assist with the reconstruction process in Iraq, and I need your help for a website that we are currently working on.
The basic idea of the site is as follows: Iraq is in a humanitarian disaster, and US soldiers frequently are familiar with the exact causes of this disaster. But at the same time, they frequently aren't prepared to do anything about the problems they see. In response, some soldiers have started sending home simple requests of things that can be sent by family members and friends back to Iraq to help with the reconstruction process, and people at home have mobilized in response. But not everyone in Iraq knows someone appropriate in America to send a request to and not everyone in America who wants to help knows a soldier in Iraq. The website ties these 2 groups together. It allows US soldiers to post requests for goods they need, and it allows US civilians to post public commitments to meeting those requests. Note that no goods go through us--we're just a coordination center for information, akin to Craigslist, but with user profiles, reviews, and histories.
You can see the (albeit buggy) prototype we are working on here: http://www.beyondorders.org
On the non-technical side, the venture is rolling. We've got students at Harvard, cadets at west point, the armed forces alumni association at Harvard Business School, and members of the armed forces club at the Kennedy School of Government on board volunteering in many substantial roles. We've also got a battalion from the 82nd airborne division in Iraq and several large NGOs and churches in America ready to test the site when it is rolled out.
On the technical side, however, we are floundering. Firstly, we only have one volunteer coder, a sophomore in college. He is great, but he regularly has to put coding aside to finish his studies. We were supposed to roll out the site for testers on November 1st, but because he had an essay to write, we had to delay the rollout on several hundred test users indefinitely just yesterday. If we had more than just one person who was able to understand the code and work on it when others became unexpectedly busy, we would have been in much better straits. Second, the code itself is unsustainable. We didn't know when we began, but not only is the language old and flawed, but there are also very few coders who want to code in ASP.
Because of these problems, we were hoping to find volunteers to help us migrate the site onto an appropriate open source PHP (or Ruby on Rails or .NET 2.0) content management system that would allow us to quickly get a basic and reliable bug free version of our site up with minimal additional work. We also hoped to lay the groundwork for allowing a larger community of volunteer coders to interact with the users of the site (US soldiers in Iraq and civilian donors in America), learn what they feel would best improve the site, and then contribute improvements to the code.
This leads me to my request for advice. We've got connections up to the secretary of the army and the potential capacity to reach every US soldier in Iraq, but when it comes to internet technologies, we're clueless. In particular, I had the following questions:
1) Is there an open source content management system or other platform that you would recommend we use for our site?
2) Do you have any suggestions for where we might look for volunteer coders, both in the short term to migrate the site as well as long term to work with the site’s users stateside and in Iraq in upgrading and improving the site?
3) How would you recommend we organize ourselves operationally if we can find those volunteers to help us?
Any way you can advise or help us would be greatly appreciated. Many people are hoping eagerly for the idea to be turned into a reality, and I, alongside my co-founders from West Point and the Army Rangers, am trying my hardest not to let them down.
And also, although I am not expecting you to volunteer your time, if you would be willing to take on a more significant role as a technology expert for our venture, please contact me. Note that we won't be able to pay you, because not only are we all volunteers, but we have all been paying for this venture out of our own pockets--taking time off from work, school, and military duties to get it off the ground. If you are willing to join us with this in mind, then please tell us. Your help will be welcome.
Tin-Yun Ho (tho@fas.harvard.edu)
Beyond Orders
“Helping US servicemen go beyond the call of duty for the Iraqi people”
I am a rising senior at Harvard taking a leave of absence to start a venture to assist with the reconstruction process in Iraq, and I need your help for a website that we are currently working on.
The basic idea of the site is as follows: Iraq is in a humanitarian disaster, and US soldiers frequently are familiar with the exact causes of this disaster. But at the same time, they frequently aren't prepared to do anything about the problems they see. In response, some soldiers have started sending home simple requests of things that can be sent by family members and friends back to Iraq to help with the reconstruction process, and people at home have mobilized in response. But not everyone in Iraq knows someone appropriate in America to send a request to and not everyone in America who wants to help knows a soldier in Iraq. The website ties these 2 groups together. It allows US soldiers to post requests for goods they need, and it allows US civilians to post public commitments to meeting those requests. Note that no goods go through us--we're just a coordination center for information, akin to Craigslist, but with user profiles, reviews, and histories.
You can see the (albeit buggy) prototype we are working on here: http://www.beyondorders.org
On the non-technical side, the venture is rolling. We've got students at Harvard, cadets at west point, the armed forces alumni association at Harvard Business School, and members of the armed forces club at the Kennedy School of Government on board volunteering in many substantial roles. We've also got a battalion from the 82nd airborne division in Iraq and several large NGOs and churches in America ready to test the site when it is rolled out.
On the technical side, however, we are floundering. Firstly, we only have one volunteer coder, a sophomore in college. He is great, but he regularly has to put coding aside to finish his studies. We were supposed to roll out the site for testers on November 1st, but because he had an essay to write, we had to delay the rollout on several hundred test users indefinitely just yesterday. If we had more than just one person who was able to understand the code and work on it when others became unexpectedly busy, we would have been in much better straits. Second, the code itself is unsustainable. We didn't know when we began, but not only is the language old and flawed, but there are also very few coders who want to code in ASP.
Because of these problems, we were hoping to find volunteers to help us migrate the site onto an appropriate open source PHP (or Ruby on Rails or .NET 2.0) content management system that would allow us to quickly get a basic and reliable bug free version of our site up with minimal additional work. We also hoped to lay the groundwork for allowing a larger community of volunteer coders to interact with the users of the site (US soldiers in Iraq and civilian donors in America), learn what they feel would best improve the site, and then contribute improvements to the code.
This leads me to my request for advice. We've got connections up to the secretary of the army and the potential capacity to reach every US soldier in Iraq, but when it comes to internet technologies, we're clueless. In particular, I had the following questions:
1) Is there an open source content management system or other platform that you would recommend we use for our site?
2) Do you have any suggestions for where we might look for volunteer coders, both in the short term to migrate the site as well as long term to work with the site’s users stateside and in Iraq in upgrading and improving the site?
3) How would you recommend we organize ourselves operationally if we can find those volunteers to help us?
Any way you can advise or help us would be greatly appreciated. Many people are hoping eagerly for the idea to be turned into a reality, and I, alongside my co-founders from West Point and the Army Rangers, am trying my hardest not to let them down.
And also, although I am not expecting you to volunteer your time, if you would be willing to take on a more significant role as a technology expert for our venture, please contact me. Note that we won't be able to pay you, because not only are we all volunteers, but we have all been paying for this venture out of our own pockets--taking time off from work, school, and military duties to get it off the ground. If you are willing to join us with this in mind, then please tell us. Your help will be welcome.
Tin-Yun Ho (tho@fas.harvard.edu)
Beyond Orders
“Helping US servicemen go beyond the call of duty for the Iraqi people”