September 23

Monday, September 23 2013 12:00pm - 1:00pm (Acorn HQ, Toronto)

Attendance: Noel, Shandheap, Michael, Zhi, Yuqiong, Monica

Meeting Activities

1. Discussion with Judy and John

• Introductions
• Asked Judy to walk us through a complaint life cycle. Her response:
  1. Flyers and posters let current residents know how they can complain about their current living situation.
  2. Current residents can then send a text message to an ACORN phone number with the building location and complaint. The format would be defined on the flyer or poster.
  3. Alternatively residents can visit a website to enter in their complaint.
  4. The complaint is one of the following categories:
  • Bed bugs
  • Cockroaches
  • Mice
  • Heating
  • Plumbing
  • Elevator not working
  • Repair order not followed
  • Mold
  • Other
  5. The complaint category, building location and time are saved to a database.
  6. The information in the database is viewed on a map.We asked Judy about the type of users and their needs. Judy described the following:
  • ACORN employees (like John): View the map to find problem areas that they should visit and focus on.
  • Current Residents: Submit complaints to the website.
  • Future Residents: Look for information about a residence they might be interested in moving to.
  • Organizations: Use the data collected to further their purposes.
• John said that it would be difficult to make current residents available for us to question, but we could attend a chapter meeting and speak to ACORN members who are current residents.
• Judy said that future meetings are best in the morning before noon. She gets to the office at 9:00 am and John gets in at 10:30 am. John could come in earlier if we set that up.
• Judy and John reiterated that it was important to develop the text messaging component as low income families often do not have access to an internet connection. Judy said they don't have much of budget for text messaging ($300 was an amount she used), and that we should present them with different options.
• Judy said that the current website is built with Drupal and gave us contact information for Peggy, the person at ACORN who deals with it.
• John and Judy said that people at the office use computers with windows, and John uses Chrome as his default browser.

2. Recapped the discussion

3. Talked about different components of the project:

   • SMS reception, response
   • Integration with Google Maps API
   • Front end work
   • Back-end with PHP/Python-django/Ruby on rails

4. Had a Greek shawarma sandwich in the Cafe across from the Acorn office

Action Items

1. Draft 20 User stories
   • Deadline: Wednesday, Sept 25
2. Write out 2 Personas
   • Deadline: Wednesday, Sept 25
3. Set up github page for project
   • Deadline: Wednesday, Sept 25