Разработка ПО
Менеджмент
Для компаний
Для стартапов
Архитектура ПО
In 2022, after Russia's military invasion of the territory of Ukraine, we performed many volunteer functions, most of which were related to helping refugees and displaced persons. We will tell you where our recommendation from deputy mayors and council deputies came from, how we helped the displaced persons headquarters, the city council, the ASC, a state school, a state library, and more. We had carried out many volunteer and non-commercial projects before as well, and during the existence of our organization we helped different people and companies. And each project or task is, of course, a separate story. But within this article, we summarized and briefly described the experience of helping displaced persons.
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As soon as we reached one of the administrative centers of Zakarpattia - the city of Rakhiv - an association of volunteers was immediately created. It is important to note that although we call this activity volunteer work, legally it does not qualify as such. We did not collect any money and never took money for our help.
Displaced persons headquarters
Upon arrival, while going through the registration process, the problems immediately stood out, which would be noticed not only by an analyst, programmer, or software architect, but by any systems-minded person. The registration of displaced persons, due to understandable force majeure circumstances, was organized spontaneously and not optimally. People arrived by train in the hundreds, were disoriented, did not understand where to go or what to do, and many were hungry. Huge queues formed, children were crying. The task of the displaced persons headquarters was to record the displaced person's data (by a number of parameters), take copies of documents, feed them, issue basic necessities, find temporary housing, and transport them to that housing. That is in brief. Of course, there were more processes at the headquarters; it was connected with the administrative services center, the city council, the police, and more. We will omit this in this article; a separate article will be prepared for it.
In short, despite the fact that we had deep engineering experience in developing accounting software, in the headquarters situation we decided that there was no time to plan and develop a complex system. We had to act immediately. Our team of 5 volunteers temporarily replaced the headquarters operators in order to learn their work and understand their processes in the necessary detail. The very next day, we proposed a number of improvements that significantly optimized the process and made it possible to completely eliminate queues.
We replaced offline spreadsheets with a cloud solution, configured a number of automatic algorithms that helped keep the data in order, revised the registration and data collection process for displaced persons, and introduced parallelism into the processes as well as the technique of deferred actions (in short, some operations could be performed asynchronously, without the person's presence). On average, we reduced the time needed to serve a displaced person dozens of times, from minutes to seconds.
City council
Database of objects, deputy mayor.
Digital transformation of the Rakhiv hromadas and the city of Rakhiv. Permission to collect data on urban non-military facilities.
The "Not an Institute" project, head of the steering committee.
ASC (City Administrative Services)
Head of the administrative services center (ASC). Automation of detecting errors in the displaced persons database. Automation of compiling an error report. Partial automation of data correction.
City school
Since the headquarters was located on one of the floors of the city school, we were introduced to the principal. Everyone was involved in helping displaced persons - teachers, state administration employees, the library, the ASC, and so on. And, accordingly, they accumulated their own problems that there was no opportunity to solve.
In particular, the school principal told us about an expensive gift for the school - an excellent electronic microscope. It was lying idle and the children could not study with it because there was absolutely no time to set it up, and no one knew how to integrate it with a computer and an interactive board.
Of course, we are not biologists and, of course, we had never had experience assembling a microscope from components, testing it, and integrating it with an operating system. But due to our interest in biology and software, we managed to set up the microscope and provide instructions on how to operate it. Now the children will be able to study even better, despite the extreme circumstances of the war. Every cloud has a silver lining, as they say. If the war had not happened, how much longer would this microscope have been lying in dust?
As encouragement for the result, we were able to enjoy the view of various organisms and their cells; in addition to stunning images of matter, we received a video review and a recommendation document. It is not always possible to teach teachers something; this was a unique opportunity.
Later it became known that due to restrictions on Russian servers, the school website stopped working. It was not just an informational website. It was the central hub for communication with students and their parents. The site administrator published notices that were especially important at the end of the school year and in preparation for the new one (which promised to be, to put it mildly, atypical).
Since we are experts in Internet technologies, servers, and complex websites, this school portal turned out to be an easy task for us. And just a couple of days after analyzing the problem, the site was operating normally and published its first announcement.
Later, having established our organization and earned trust, we were allocated a huge two-room space and more than 10 computers to implement another volunteer project for teaching city residents and displaced persons IT technologies and programming. We will mention this in this article, and describe it in more detail in a separate text.
City library and Internet center
Computer optimization
Computer repair, OS optimization
Other
As part of the volunteer project, other useful activities were also initiated, such as interaction with police officers to provide data to the department,
As part of the help.ingello project, an online community was organized (up to 30 people), which did not exist for long due to the need to be present online, but special thanks go to Dmitry Neynyuk and Natalia Kosheva for their help in implementing an automated translation system in the software for displaced persons.
