Computing concepts applied to the mobile platform : developing a smart and adaptive mobile volunteering application

Abstract

Held in joint collaboration with the National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre (NVPC), the national body that promotes volunteerism and philanthropy in Singapore, and its volunteering platform SG Cares, the project spearheads the development efforts for Volunteer!, a mobile volunteering application that makes volunteering easy and accessible by providing a tailored mobile platform to volunteers to access SG Cares’ services.

Recognizing the unique advantages of mobile technology, the team seeks to create a fun, social and personalized user experience, to effectively reach out to more potential volunteers, and especially the tech-savvy youths. The project incorporates principles of game mechanics, social networking, and user modelling and recommendation systems into the mobile application. The team aims to establish precedents for applying computing concepts to mobile development, and gain a deeper understanding of the value in smart, adaptive applications on the mobile platform.

The project is expected to last from December 2011 to May/June 2012, and is completed upon successful deployment of the application and handover to NVPC for maintenance. NVPC provides guidance, resources and support to the team, which plans and executes the development of the mobile application on the Android platform. Volunteer! is defined as an Android Mobile application that runs on Android version Froyo (2.2) onwards.