Sounds like you have some amazing and highly relevant experience @tommy.hagvall! Time is a factor obviously though and we’re wanting to start sharing WGACA in the real world ASAP (I’ve already started with real neighbours here in London).
If you’re able to help with Swedish localisation that would be immensely helpful, thank you. Can I suggest you get in contact with @aldo.ercolani in the first instance? He’s also working with a senior Dutch Pythonista so hopefully between the three of you, you can not only create three local language versions of WGACA but build a framework that makes it easy for other volunteers to create even more versions quickly and easily. I think the exercise might also be a good way of showing you around the internals of the code, after which I imagine you’d have a million suggestions for improvement!
Another repeating challenge for local versions of the app is going to be the creation of an address dictionary for the signup form. Each country might have slightly different datasets - I’m almost finished automating the process of scraping County-Town-Street combinations from 800+ spreadsheets from the UK’s Ordinance Survey data set. I did start looking at global datasets, online services, and tools like Geopy and Pelias but there are local quirks that I think are best left to local volunteer developers rather than trying to force a one-size-fits-all solution.
My current thoughts for WGACA address data are:
- We need to standardise address data when a user signs up, otherwise matching Offer and Request addresses gets difficult.
- The basic internal structure is a nested dictionary of Country, County (or Borough/State/Department/District) - sometimes combined for simplicity and to avoid hierarchies of different depths e.g. “Wandsworth, London” for the London Borough of London in Greater London, Town (or Village, or City), and finally a list of Streets. House Name/Number and Postcode are provided by the user since they’re sometimes incorrect on public databases.
- I did consider making API requests on services like Google Maps, Photon, or OpenStreetMap, but with potentially huge numbers of WGACA users didn’t want to spend time with API keys and getting around quotas etc, so the pragmatic approach for now is for each local version of the app to have its own prepopulated ‘database’ (Python dictionary… or import directly into an Anvil data table) containing the address hierarchy.
- House Name/Number is only shared with the volunteer Runner once a delivery job is confirmed. “Need to know” privacy basis.
- Postcode is deliberately not mandatory and therefore not relied upon in the code. The (rudimentary) matching is by County-Town combination currently and this is also sufficient to convert to Geocode (in progress) to estimate distances and pop up a helpful map. Postcodes are shared when authorised by the person making, or receiving an Offer.
Finally regarding ‘pricing’, my intention was to run this as (my first ever) Open Source project with the deliberate aim of encouraging up-take in the community. Having said that, I was wondering about putting a Donate Button in there (with Stripe, which you mentioned) so people could, if they want to, encourage and thank each local developer (and other selectable local charities) for their time and give them the financial head-space to offer even more time making improvements and keeping it all working (e.g. providing support and data/code updates etc).
Hope that makes sense, and sorry if I’m rambling! Basic please we’d love have your help, and @aldo.ercolani would be a great first contact.