Flowy for UNICEF

I recently had the opportunity to develop a web application for UNICEF in co-ordination with Evan Wheeler of the UNICEF Digital Centre of Excellence. I was chosen to work alongside six other University of Toronto students (as part of CSC301) to develop Flowy - a web application to assist UNICEF employees in sharing and finding message flows for their open-source platform RapidPro.

For context, a message flow is a configuration for RapidPro to operate automated SMS services. UNICEF uses these flows to co-ordinate their support services over a number of countries and continents, so being able to share a message flow designed in an office based in one country with others around the world would be highly beneficial.

Our design process began, after guidance from Evan Wheeler, with an initial mockup and Figma prototype. Once we coordinated with the UNICEF team on a fine-grain plan of action, we began our implementation, using Python’s FastAPI framework as the basis for our backend, with Docker for deployment via GitHub Actions. Our frontend was implemented using React at its core, and our database was built via PostgreSQL with Peewee ORM. We included full testing for all functionality via PyTest, run automatically by GitHub Actions.

My primary tasks as part of this project - in addition to acting as the team’s Product Manager - were the integration with RapidPro via its provided API to allow importing of flows directly to Flowy, implementation of flow searching by text and/or tags, and collaboration on adding the flow sharing and user-creation functionalities.

We had the opportunity to present our work yesterday at the University of Toronto’s inaugural Sandbox UNICEF Showcase to representatives of the UNICEF, the university, and members of the media. I am very proud of the work we were able to achieve, and I want to again thank my groupmates Juan Acosta, Eric Huang, Yue Fung Lee, Terence Liu, Clark Zhang, & Azalea Gui for all of their excellent work.

Unfortunately our GitHub repository is private, so I cannot share the codebase like I usually do, however we do have a version of the web app deployed if you would like to make an account and try it out. From what I understand, UNICEF plans to host their own version of the site very soon and put it to good use.

Go to Flowy