CharityRun

CharityRun is a software that was developed for the Gymnasium Raubling, which does a charity run every four years for aid organizations in Sri Lanka and Bolivia. The goal was to display the distance that was run in total by the school on a map, with the ultimate goal of reaching Sri Lanka or Bolivia. Over time, the software's tasks grew and it has become rich in features, such as also being responsible for calculating the overall donations per person, which was previously done by hand.

The first version of the software was used at the charity run in 2014, where it managed roughly a thousand pupils and teachers.

For all other runs, beginning as of 2018, the software was completely rebuilt from scratch, with real world experience from the first run.

I decided to release it as open source software under the MIT license, to allow others to build upon this platform or simply use it for their own runs.

How to use

The software was built with four types of devices in mind:

• A server, which holds the data and does the processing
• A presenter, which is connected to a projector, showing the live map
• Multiple smartphones used my the run's assistants, to enter new round information
• A router to connect all devices

In our case, the server and presenter were one single device, a laptop connected to the projector and router. As server software, you can use packages like XAMPP, which bundles all software needed to install and is already preconfigured (the only requirements are php7+ and apache as server software). As second step, unzip the software files into your server root. (If you are using XAMPP, it is the htdocs directory in your XAMPP installation folder.)

The router has to have the ability to let devices communicate within the same network, please check that. AVM routers all seem to work fine, but you may have to test that first. After connecting all devices to the router (which is not connected to the internet!) it's the last step to find out the server's local IP address. Entering it into a browser on any other connected device should bring up the installation page (enter it the same way as you would normally enter google.com, but now it's something like 192.168.178.100).

After you are finished setting everything up, assistants can log in via the login button (bottom right corner) on their devices. Phase one begins now, which includes entering all data into the software. After that, the administrator logs in and revokes the assistant's permission to enter or edit user data. This is to assure that no one accidentally deletes a runner or alters some other data during the run. The administrator can revoke the their permission by clicking on the red banner on his sidebar. From now on, only the administrator is able to edit or delete runners, donators and donations. Until that point, the administrator account should not have been used.

Phase two is the actual run, assistants are able to add rounds to runners sequentially. This can either be done in real time or in a fixed interval, e.g. every 30 minutes.

After the run has finished, the administrator is able to download the donator and runner data, which includes the rounds ran per runner and per group, the donators, and how much they donate, already calculated.

Download

You can download the latest release here: https://github.com/michaelspiss/charityrun/releases

License

MIT