Micro-Volunteering

Client: Michael Elliott (provisional) JPMorgan <Michael.Elliott@jpmorgan.com>

Many charities rely on volunteer networks, but small local charities sometimes don't have the staff to maintain those networks. On the flip side, many people would like to volunteer to help a local charity but aren't able to commit a set number of hours per week. Micro-volunteering allows individuals to offer up their skills on an ad-hoc basis and for charities to take advantage of that, and is extremely valuable to smaller charities or community organisations. Your task is to design a micro-volunteering exchange, that can match volunteers and their skills to opportunities and needs in their local area. Locality is critical in micro volunteering, perhaps a graph database (like neo4j) would be interesting here. Remember also that skills and needs often involve different terminology - how will your system understand that the skill of "simple wiring jobs" should be matched to the need of "broken bulb in shelter"?