Bless: Open-source Map-powered Simple Homeless Management Information System (HMIS)

by Fady S. Ghatas | Nov 13, 2022 | Management | 0 comments

Bless System allows you to automate and manage food distribution to homeless people, by creating groups consisting of group admins (One or more) and food servers (Those who prepare food and deliver it to homeless). On the system, you can store locations on map to indicate the number of people in each area so that the route to cover them and the number of needed meals can be easily calculated.

Bless was implemented as part of our 2023 NGO initiative.

How to setup the system? Where is the source code?

For technical details and setup: github.com/TiTrias/bless

How to login the first time?

You can use bless@titrias.com as username and password as the password, as long as the technical team didn’t change the defaults in the seeder (Check the technical setup on github)

How to add new users?

In Bless, you can’t directly add a user to a group, but instead, the user needs to register the group.

To do so, the user needs to click on Register button on the homepage.

Then you need to populate the form to complete your registration

Once a new user registers, they will need the group leader to activate them.

How to activate a new user?

As a leader, go to Group > Users, then activate the user.

Once the user is activated, they can use the email and password to login

How to add new location?

To add a new homeless person or family location, Click on Locations in the header and then Add.

This will take you to our Geographical information system entry page, where you can either click on “Get Location” to mark your current location using GPS (Global Positioning System), or you can use the map to enter a different location on map.

Then add the “Number of Meals” and any extra “Comments” and then “Submit“