Q: You’re new to this project, where can you begin?

A: First of all, we’re happy to know you’re interested in this project. By now, you might know that we’re building an open-source chatting platform between NGOs and their beneficiaries. It is a great opportunity for us to make an impact on the society by targeting something as basic as communication between NGOs and their community.

You can get a complete picture of the project by reading our kickoff story here.

After that, you can follow our journey of building and learning here with respect to the community you belong to – Tech, Design, or Nonprofit.
 
 

 Q: How can you contribute to the project?

A: You can contribute to specific technical aspects of the project. You can choose to stick to a specific technology or design area of your preference. You can do both design and development if you want. We’ll be happy to know which areas you prefer by filling out a simple form here. If you’re starting new with these technologies, we’ll also support you in your journey to learn and get up to speed, to start contributing.

Q: What is the selection process for this project?

A: Tides – open source project is open for everyone. There’s no selection process as such. If you have the energy and dedication to learn and build you software development skills then you’re welcome to join. There’s no commitment from ColoredCow or person participating in the project, other than the commitment to ourselves to do great. If someone doesn’t have the right technology or design skills to execute the project right now but they’re still interested to join in, we have the relevant resource for them to learn and get started.

Q: If you’re contributing to this project, are you a part of ColoredCow?

A: The answer is yes because you’re a part of ColoredCow community. And also no, because you’re not a ColoredCow employee and there’s no binding between us. Being a part of our extended community can surely be a way for you to enter the inner circle and become an employe. We prefer to induct people from our known network. But even if you’re new, we won’t take much time to be friends. Just drop a hi!

Q: Is this a paid project?

A: No, it’s an open-source project being built for the community, by the community. It is a great opportunity for someone to learn and contribute through their design, tech, marketing, communication, or business skills.

Q: What technologies are being used and why?

A: We spent a lot of time with the idea to be built, and the available technologies to build it with. Debating why one is more relevant than the other. And we arrived at the final tech-stack which includes many of the latest technology frameworks. Here are the technologies and why:

Phoenix, a framework of Elixir

• We’re building the back-end of the application with Phoenix. We were impressed with their documentation and environment setup steps.
• It is famous for scalability and concurrency which is why WhatsApp(which is the core of the platform we’re building) and telecommunication companies use this language to manage their incoming and outgoing payloads.
• Phoenix helps in the rapid development of Restful APIs and web applications.
• It will also support when we build machine learning and natural language processing components in the platform

React

• We’re building the application front-end with React. It is the latest technology one of the preferred choices of the developers.
• It has a strong community and is backed by Facebook, falling in the Whatsapp ecosystem.
• It provides various open-source libraries to support the functionalities.

ML/NLP

• We want our platform users to be able to leverage the intelligence of the system so that they can scale their reach to a larger audience.
• The use of ML/NLP will provide our users with auto-suggested responses, language support and understanding the intent of the audience better so that the response can accordingly be enhanced.