Two earthquakes, one with 7.8 magnitude happened at 4:00 am while everyone was sleeping in their beds children alone in their room, the other one with 7.5 magnitude happened next day during midday when everybody thought it was safe to enter damaged building to collect their survival kits and holdings. February, during snowy winter conditions in south-east Turkey, no one was prepared, for neither of them.

The damage was extreme, 520.000 buildings were collapsed along with many families trying to survive under the buildings. And there was no help, not until the next day and only a few. Hundreds of villages were left out because there’s simply no more professionals left. We were all hearth-broken all the time imagining the conditions for these people and how can we help more.

So when we heard there’s a non-profit project shaping to help these people, we didn’t even hesitate to offer all our help. This collaborated project was with Getir’s developers and n11’s product owners and they need some people to handle all design part. We paused any current project we had and focused on this one for 2 days straight to deliver the final finished product.

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SCRUM Against Time:

During this period all we watch during the day was the news, feeling terrible and useless. As Astro team we wanted to go there and deliver any help as we possibly can give. But the living standarts were harsh after the earthquake. There was no water, no electricty, no gas, no food, no toilets and no place to stay during snowy days. And we were hearing news how some gangs have been stopping the trucks who has been carrying water, food and proper heating equipment and stealing the help. We were furious about how things were not handled well.

Getir and n11 team members were feeling exactly the same way so the open source project of Afet logistics had borned. We were basically would log into details for each aid truck to follow their transportation process and check materials. AHPAP which was the best non-profit organization who were working 24/7 to bring help where the government didn’t. They needed this specific tool to ease their process and track the aid.

I think we skipped few meals while developing the designs of this project constantly attending meeting with the whole team including developers. Whatever page we complete, it was going straight to development. There wasn’t any minute to waste.

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Problem Statements:

• It was hard to organize each aid truck because simply every organization were understaffed for this extreme distruction.
• The aid in the trucks were stolen by gangs along the travel. Sometimes even the trucks. It was hard for the organizations to keep track and assist help in emergencies.

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Design Solutions:

• A simple dashboard with multiple profiles easy to create.
• Only non-profit organization’s admins could create more volunteer or driver profiled users.
• Each aid truck needed to be logged in and confirmed by the organization before the driver can start the transportation process.
• If there’s delay of any kind, the system would send an alert to the organization to call the driver immediately.

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Early Insights in MVP:

In the development process, product owners reached the non-profit organizations to set up their accounts. The project took 2 days to design and 2 weeks to full stack develop. It was live in 3 weeks with completing debugging, ready for the organization to manage their volunteer aid process.

We had design revisions handled to remove some of the extra table items to keep the platform as simple to develop and as effective to use as possible.