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Last active June 15, 2016 12:29
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Documentation for the Food Rescue project
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food-rescue-documentation.md

Background

From the main BFR Robot Google Doc for administrators:

From the volunteer’s perspective, the robot is a fairly simple tool that magically understands which shift they’ve decided to do, and sends them email (or text message) reminders to do it and to subsequently enter data for it. It also shows cool statistics about how much food has been rescued, gives bike friendly directions between donors and recipients, keeps track of contact information and special notes, allows them to schedule absences, and to pick up and cover shifts.

Behind the scenes, every night “log entries” are generated for the next 48 hours using the current schedule as a template. Each of these “logs” corresponds to some particular scheduled pick up, where some volunteer is responsible for moving food from a particular donor to a particular recipient at a given time. You can look at today’s logs and tomorrow’s logs to see what is scheduled to occur. You can think of log entries as an empty entry in a receipt book---it has the basic information, but still needs the important bits filled out. Once a log entry has been created, the robot will send reminders (nightly usually) to the volunteer to enter data for that pick up.

The volunteer is responsible for recording the weight, description, transportation type, and any notes they’d like to pass along to you (equipment issues, etc.). This creates a sort of “accountability system”, so that you can verify that pick ups are happening, identify possible problems. And, to the great benefit of the volunteer coordinator, most of this is automated. As a nice bonus, the robot will also keep track of how much food is being rescued so you can do (silly but nevertheless important) things like write grants, tell the press how much food you’ve rescued, or issue tax deductible receipts to donors.

Notes

  • The automatic registration email needs some jazzing up. The field in the Region Admin → Settings area for Welcome Email Text does support HTML but you need to craft this yourself. Use a HTML editor (like TinyMCE online), copy-paste the HTML into the editor (replacing the demo), make your edits, and copy-paste the source HTML out again into the Food Rescue Robot.
  • SMS notifications are unlikely to work and appear to be US-carrier specific. Contact the main Boulder Food Rescue team for more information.

Documentation

Getting help

Logging in

  1. Login at https://robot.boulderfoodrescue.org/

  2. Register if need be and choose Food Rescue Initiative Townsville as Region

  3. Inform Rike or another admin once you've done this

  4. Behind the scenes, the admin will need to login, go to Volunteers --> Unassigned and assign the account.

  5. Once assigned by an admin, log in and agree to the liability statement

  6. Set up your profile (User --> Settings)

Difference between admin and volunteer

  • Volunteers are missing the Region Admin menu and reporting tabs
  • Have fewer settings on the User settings page (admins can disable and add notes and edit profiles)
  • Can see only active volunteers and general Contact List

Logged-in interface

  • Main areas are across the top, drop down menus
    • On small devices, this compress into the hamburger menu on the top right

User menu

  • Settings --> Profile
    • Instruct people to edit their details
  • Waiver: review the waiver or sign if they haven't
  • Logout

Region Admin

  • Donors / Recipients: locations list
    • Add new entries through New Location for field at right
      • Take care when adding a new location to select the correct Location Type from the drop down list!
    • Overview by clicking name at left
    • Search is at the right (auto update)
    • HUD: heads-up-display, overview of pickups and schedule
      • Can send this URL with key=XXXX to the donor so they can see the schedule without needing to ask
    • Edit: ability to change a location (eg Cotters demo)
    • Delete: will prompt, but does what it says, take care!
  • Food Types
    • Add new entries through New Location for field at right
    • Edit / Delete
  • Scale Types (ignore this)
  • Controls: admin controls to switch to user or export data. Very useful for testing as someone else or helping select shifts.
    • Switch to User: for testing / data entry as someone else (take care)
    • Export Data to CSV file for MS Excel or Word
    • Generate Receipts: generate PDFs for Donors of food donated
    • Grant admin access: does what it says, take care!
  • Absences: shows people if they're marked absent
  • Settings: central control for all aspects of the FRIT group in the system (logo, name, URLs, email text etc)
    • Possible to add rich HTML (images etc) to your homepage and to the welcome email.

Volunteers menu

Each of these areas are just different ways of listing users, all colour coded (region admin vs needs training; just means they need to complete a shift and log the results).

  • Active
  • Shiftless
  • Needs Training
  • Inactive/disabled
  • Full list (everyone)
  • Stats+Charts (statisitcs)

Schedule

  • Full Schedule
  • Yesterday
  • Today
  • Tomorrow

Admins enter the schedule for pickups and assign volunteers using this interface. Add notes and configure accordingly.

  • Create a demo schedule so we can see when and where this shows up for volunters.
  • Either a One Time pickup at a given date or time or a Weekly pickup
  • Set number of volunteers, stops, weight, notes etc
  • Temporary Cover allows more than the prescribed volunteers to help out and cover the shift
  • Deleting: system will likely error on deletion, but the delete finished. Go back and refresh the page.

Manual logs

  • Click Take Shifts --> One-time Shifts and choose New item for --> Go
  • Enter Pick-up report details (expand the Details drop-down in middle of page)
  • When done, click Save Changes

As a volunteer account

User flow

  1. Volunteer signs up at https://robot.boulderfoodrescue.org/
  2. Register choose Food Rescue Initiative Townsville as Region
  3. They need to inform Rike or admin they've done this
  4. Admin logs into the Robot to assign volunteer to our location
  5. To do this, go to Volunteers --> Unassigned, find the person's name and click Assign. The user gets a welcome email when this happens.
  • Take care here because of other people who aren't associated with Townsville are in this listing (eg rest of Boulder groups)!

Demo

  • Switch to a volunteer with Region Admin --> Controls in a new browser window.
  • Compare the two views, a lot fewer tabs.

Registering as a volunteer

  • Home page will show a link to open shifts available
  • Also available under Take shifts
  • Volunteer can take a shift, they get shown the relevant information about what they are to do
  • Also shown locations and other info under Your Shifts

Details apparently get generated each night for the forthcoming 48 hours. Unsure what timezone as the software runs in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Finally, I'm unsure as to where pickup reports are produced. You should confirm with Boulder Food Rescue, but it appears as though the pickup reports will be able to be inputted afterwards (unsure if by volunteer or admin). Admins can always create logs for any situation manually.

What next?

  • Try it out!
  • Get some volunteers testing the system
  • Report any issues or ask any questions to the Boulder Food Rescue group.
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