Jeffrey Chan, Ryan Lacey, Amruth Venkatraman

User Classes

Parents Interested In Giving

• Have children that have either grown up or simply grown out of using certain toys

Families Interested In Exchange

• Children may be interested in the toys they have, but want others
• Parents may instill values in children to prevent spoiling (ie a little sacrifice on the child's behalf is required for the child to get something they want)

Families / Organizations Interested In Receiving

• Day cares and other organizations dealing with children
• Many low income families may not be able to afford toys they children want

User Interviews

Once per semester volunteer

This user was a member of a fraternity that requires every member to do some form of community service each semester. The user is not particularly enthusiastic about doing community service – that is, he will not go out of his way to get involved. His requirements for what he is willing to do are rather specific. He wants to do something one-off that he will enjoy and does not require a large time commitment. Upon being asked what the biggest challenge was to finding something he would do, he remarked that “It’s really hard to find something I’m interested in doing for a short period of time. If I could find a place to teach computer science I’d do it, even if I had to drive an extra 15 minutes.” He also indicated that getting involved in events with friends would make the experience much more enjoyable. The user voiced frustration with current systems for finding interesting opportunities after dealing with MIT’s PSC service digests.

Weekly hospital and church volunteer

Larry is an aspiring pre-med student at an undergraduate university. As a pre-med student, he has an extremely busy schedule with a full courseload of classes as well as labwork. Larry hopes to find weekly health-related community-service opportunities that will fit into his busy schedule. He often has to read through hundreds of emails to find a health-related community service opportunity for the semester and must repeat his search every new semester due to schedule changes. The biggest problem is that older postings are difficult to recover since they are buried under thousands of more recent listings.*
*Unfortunately, many of the health-related opportunities fail to specify the exact job that he would be doing with the hospital, which is drastically affects the enjoyability of Larry’s community service experience.

Soup kitchen coordinator

Olga is an organizer of a soup kitchen in Harvard Square. She collaborates with a local church to encourage people to help serve food to the needy. She has to deal with people of all ages, from young to old. She observed that involving a tight group of people from church as well as a few outsiders, the majority of people that frequent the soup kitchen as volunteers are often the same people. There were, however, some people that cycle in and out of the program, typically college students looking for one-time service chances. She noted that the way most people found out about her soup kitchen was through word of mouth, typically from a college student who was involved at the church that was spearheading the initiative. In an effort to get more people involved, she remarked that being able to market the service to more people would cause results two-fold. More people in the local area could find something nearby to do that they otherwise would never hear about, and the earlier you get people exposed to volunteering, the more likely they are likely to do it later on. She seemed to believe strongly in encouraging college-aged kids to engage in service. She also mentioned that a number of the single-time volunteers didn't realize the commitment they would be making while at the soup-kitchen. Having heard about the event from a friend, logistical information was often lost in the middle.

Goals

Targeted Content Delivery

Both the short-term and long-term user expressed concern for the difficulty to find things they were interested in. The most important factor to both of the aforementioned user classes in deciding upon a service opportunity was that the type of activity aligning with their interests. For our short-term user who did not care for doing community service, this was paramount for him to be even slightly excited about helping others. For the long-term user, given the nature of his commitment to the activity, being passionate for the work was a priority as well. Users should be able to identify their interests with the intent that the opportunities they are presented with are ones that they find exciting and worthwhile.

Easy to view database of opportunities

The long-term user remarked that a system in place like that used for the externship program at MIT would be useful to get more information on community service. In the particular example he gave of volunteering at a hospital, since each hospital puts its volunteers in different capacities with different time commitments, it becomes hard to keep track of the opportunities that work well with one’s requirements. This example generalizes to any number of community service events in different fields, where the interested party is looking for a subset of details about the event often not listed elsewhere.

Standardized Event Listings

The service should offer a way for organizations to register events for interested volunteers to view. Considerations for differentiating events include: the category of the event (eg. environmental, homeless, food, education, etc.), time (what period of the day), repeatability (one time event or recurring), and the type of activity. Olga the Organizer raised the issue that often times volunteers are unaware of the types of commitments they are making, which sours their attitude towards the event. Creating well defined events should help the organizations target the volunteers they are interested in and avoid having these problems arise.

Facilitation of Collaboration

Volunteering as a group, especially with friends, makes the service much more enjoyable. This was especially emphasized by the sort-term user and supported by the long-term user upon questioning. The sort-term user expressed an interest in being able to notify friends of which events he was interested in. Additionally, preference would be given to a service opportunity that satisfies the larger group over individual desires if catering to the group would bring in more collaborators.