
Show HN: VETS – Volunteer Effort Tracking System - ceeekay
About 5 years ago I volunteered to help our local SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) build a computerized system for tracking hours that their volunteers spent. This an important part of the volunteer coordinator&#x27;s job, as there are hours&#x2F;year requirements for volunteers, awards given out annually, etc. Prior to that they were using a paper binder with sign-in sheets, and adding up everything by hand at the end of the month. With about 1000 active volunteers, this was no small task, and seemed like a place computerization would be an amazing help. I wrote up a simple system in Rails (which I had spent a fair amount of hobby time with) and it&#x27;s been running there ever since.<p>Today, there are about 67,000 &quot;hours&quot; entries in the database, about about 3,000 volunteers (1&#x2F;3 of them active), and the system is a little slower than it ought to be (my original testing was with tens of records, since there was no existing database to import). Rather than try to update and re-learn ruby and rails, I opted to give a try porting the essential parts of the system to Python using bottle.py<p>The result of my work is now up at https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vets&#x2F;vets and licensed under MIT.<p>I&#x27;m at a point where things are about functionally complete and I&#x27;d love to hear feedback from anyone willing to take the time to take a look at it. It&#x27;s a generic enough system that I could see other non-profit organizations (who often have much&#x2F;any money available to spend on commercial software that can track things like this) being interesting in this.<p>Things I&#x27;m not that great at, which are incidentally the main things this project uses:<p>* Python
* bottle.py
* SQL
* HTML&#x2F;CSS<p>This is a hobby project for me (I&#x27;m a C programmer by day) so I am probably taking a naive approach in most cases, but in some cases I know that when I re-deploy this version of the system, it&#x27;s likely to sit for another 5+ years.
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patrickgokey
I have been putting together a list of software to look at for a tech-based
activism/volunteerism site I'm working on. This looks like it could be very
useful and I'm looking forward to checking it out this weekend. Thanks for
this!

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chrmaury
Have you published this list yet? I'd be very interested to take a look.

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samstave
Need a foursquare for volunteer projects: Check-in that youre here doing X
(with GPS checkin, as needed)

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tghw
Clickable link:

[https://github.com/vets/vets](https://github.com/vets/vets)

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ceeekay
Thanks I hadn't submitted on HN before- was there something I should have done
to make it clickable?

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dang
Posts without URLs are penalized anyway, so you'd be better off reposting this
whole thing with a link to the project, and adding your text above as a first
comment to the thread. Good luck. Email us at hn@ycombinator.com if you have
any trouble.

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ceeekay
Thanks! Reposted as
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8182973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8182973)

