Estamos On — Our Contribution
We are living unique times. For most generations this is the first major pandemic we have ever faced. For our own good and those around us we are urged to maintain social distance in order to stop it. But today more than ever, we have to be resilient and creative, to be in solidarity and to stay united even if at a distance. Above all, we need to keep ourselves informed, to understand where the questions and answers are, what measures are being taken to deal with the pandemic and the enormous challenges that this fight unleashes.
So, in order to compile all this information (already published on the website created by VOST) in a single channel accessible in a few seconds and with a small number of taps, the mobile application “Estamos On” was born, available for download at Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
This App was made possible due to the volunteer work of Flutter Portugal and VOST Portugal. For those who wonder what these communities or groups are or what they do, let’s get to know them a little better.
Flutter Portugal is one of the official communities that shares knowledge and promotes Google’s Flutter technology to create applications for mobile, web and desktop. The community is composed of volunteers from all over the continental and insular territory. It organizes events, such as conferences and workshops, of greater or lesser dimension, taking into account the objective and the public for which they are intended.
VOST is the acronym for Virtual Operations Support Team, which in Portugal assumes itself as Digital Volunteers in Emergency Situations, that is, people committed to providing information and making the population more enlightened, informed, prepared and protected. Since October 16th, 2019, it is formally constituted as a civil protection association called VOST Portugal — Associação de Voluntários Digitais em Situações de Emergência.
Both organizations share the same values — everything that is produced by the community is open sourced — which means the code is open and allows it to be viewed and reviewed by anyone. Furthermore, those who want to help can do so by contributing to the project.
The first cases of Covid-19 appeared in Portugal in early March. Their unequivocal spread led to the declaration of a state of emergency, through the Decree of the President of the Republic №14-A/2020 of March 18th. In order to turn the available information more transparent and widely accessible, the Government of Portugal launched an appeal for the need to build a portal that would aggregate all the information. This was built by VOST Portugal, which in turn requested Flutter Portugal’s help so that the mobile application could be created.
However, with one of the communication channels already developed in the form of a website, the question may arise: is there a need to create a mobile application?
Putting aside personal choice (the fact that we may like to access a website or prefer to use an app), an application gives us a quick means of communication with all users in the form of Push Notifications. As soon as there is an update on the state of emergency, new measures by the State or an update of the new case numbers, a Push Notification can quickly send the information to all users, without them having to go to the website. In future updates, new features can also be added, such as local caching so that even offline, all information is easily accessible.
Saying that the project had a short deadline would not do justice to the urgency of the situation, so it was very important to choose a technology that allowed us to deliver a robust application in the shortest possible time. Since, initially, we were only a team of 5, creating two native applications was out of the question, so we adopted Flutter. For the Flutter Portugal team the choice was easy, for several reasons:
- Flutter allows 2 applications to be created with one code base — for Android and iOS, reducing the project execution time to half;
- Each one of us had already proven the robustness of the technology, with personal projects or by the fact that it is the technology we use in our daily work;
- We are all passionate about this technology, and quite often we use our Discord to discuss ideas and ask questions to each other;
- Our team had already worked together for the Fogos.pt project, which consisted in a rewrite of the existing project to Flutter, so not only had we proven that we were able to deliver a project as a team, but we also proved that Flutter was a great choice for this kind of project.
With the completion of this project, many lessons have been learned that we would like to share here:
- The urgency and scale of this project required fast and efficient communication, so we chose to use our Discord server for it. We have divided the communication into two channels. The first channel’s purpose, with voice and audio, was to quickly discuss all the issues of the project and ask for help from other team members. The second channel had only important announcements — new features, status of the project, what we had to do and new information from the VOST channel.
- It was crucial that all the members of the team already knew each other and worked together. This made it easy to divide up tasks so that we always took advantage of each other’s strengths — communication with other entities, design, preparation of a testing and distribution platform or project organisation and management.
- The fact that we had direct contact with the designer Francisco Frutuoso and that he made the project available to us in Zeplin, made it easier and faster to create all the screens.
- The most important thing was that there was great mutual respect for all members of the team. This made us listen and discuss opinions, even if these were against what we would be used to. Together we grew, learned and prepared for future projects.
The willingness to help others in this time of crisis and the willingness to want to work together again is what brought this team together. Opportunities like these fill us with experience that we will apply in our job and in our life in general. We are confident that this can be replicated by other teams of programmers and designers around the world, provided there is a basis for mutual respect and a common goal.
Finally, we leave a message for Non-Profit Organizations and government bodies:
The Flutter Portugal team is here, more united than ever.
Challenge us.
Written by Gonçalo Palma and Simone Júlio
You want to help this cause? Go to the Github repository of the “Estamos On” app and see what issues are open!
Website Flutter Portugal:
Twitter Flutter Portugal:
Join our Discord server! → http://chat.flutter.pt
