Läkare i Världen provides medical care primarily for those who fall through the cracks of the public welfare system. This is, for example, EU migrants, addicts, homeless and similar people. They do this through volunteers, who staff clinics at regular occasions. Every clinic is a physical location, and sometimes referred to simply by which city it is in, since (here in Sweden) it is very nearly the case that there is exactly one per city. Stockholm has two, but the secondary one is very small, and it is OK for this system to ignore its existence.
An occasion needs to have a number of different positions filled for it to be functional. These positions are things like "doctor", "nurse", "dentist", "doctor with prescription rights", "translator" and so on. These have differing levels of importance. For example, dentists are only occasionally present, while a doctor with prescription rights must be present or the occasion will be severely crippled (since they won't be able to give the patients medications).
Apart from the volunteers, there is a head office with a handful of paid employees. They work as administrators, coordinators and such.
Volunteers are people who donate their time and expertise. We can make very few demands on them. Their levels of technical expertise fill roughly the entire possible spectrum, from those who need assistance with using the current Google Spreadsheet to those who are competent programmers. Our system should require as little expertise as at all possible.
We can assume that a volunteer only works for a single clinic.
Today, the entire system is protected by a single shared password. Access control is not a primary concern. More important is a significant level of anonymity (or pseudonymity) for the volunteers. While Läkare i Världen currently has a good relationship with the Swedish police forces, this is not at all guaranteed and some of their sister organisations in other countries have it considerably worse. It must not be required to reveal one's identity in order to volunteer except where legally mandated (i.e., for doctors with prescription rights). It is OK to let volunteers create individual identities in the system (to keep track of schedules, for example), but it must be optional.
When we talked with a small group of volunteers, they gave this as their most wanted features.
- Usability from mobile devices (this was mentioned repeatedly).
- Overview of which future occasions need positions filled.
- Overview of which future occasions their friends have signed up for.
- Simple way of notifying the administrators if they have to cancel after they've signed up for an occasion.
Clinics have physical locations, a number of associated occaions and a number of associated volunteers.
Occasions are scheduled times when a clinic is open for patients. Occasions are mostly regularly reoccuring and scheduled far in advance (months, possibly up to a year). An occasion has a pre-determined number of roles that need to be filled. For example, it can be that most weeks an occasion has one doctor with prescription rights, one other doctor (with or without the rights), two to four nurses and optionally a translator. Every fourth week or so, there is an occasion which also has a dentist. These "slots" are decided in advance by the administrators, and then volunteers opt in to fill them. If the required number of positions have not been filled some time before the occasion, an alarm should be sent to the administrators.
The administrators are either the paid staff at the Stockholm office or volunteers with extra responsibilities and rights. In either case, they should receive extra training in the use and administration of the system. They should be able to create and remove clinics, set schedules for occaions and view statistics about past occasions. Particularly, they requested the ability to see how often volunteers have actually worked at a clinic, both so they can prod those who sign up to volunteer but never do so and so that they can reward those who work a lot. They also asked for an ability to show announcements to the users of the system, and track who has seen them.