The Food Rescue Robot is a Rails 3 web application for managing the logistics of just-in-time (i.e., warehouse-less) food rescue. It keeps track of donors, recipients, a pickup and delivery schedule, and all the volunteers responsible for doing the work. It sends reminders to users about their pickups. The site also logs how much food is rescued, and can automatically issue receipts for donations.
Currently, the “Food Rescue Robot” is live at robot.boulderfoodrescue.org and is used by 10 cities around the world. If you’re keen to use it, shoot an email to caleb at boulder food rescue (dot) org, and I can set you up with an account. Alternatively, if you would like to fork the source and hack on it yourself you are welcome to. This code is licensed under a Beerware-style license:
As long as you retain this notice you can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return.
Most of the site was written by Caleb Phillips, a co-founder of Boulder Food Rescue (www.boulderfoodrescue.org) and adjunct Computer Science professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Currently the site is also being developed in part by folks at MIT Media labs, and some early design work was done by Sean Weise under an award from the Casey Feldman Foundation:
If you want to help with development, feel free to fork the project. If you have something to submit upstream, send a pull request from your fork.