In the past week or so, I’ve been working on a Laravel application that enables groups of volunteers to be added to a call tree; a phone number comes in, then gets routed to one of the active volunteers’ phone. A lot of the core functionality is there, but the app isn’t quite ready to release to the general public. There’s something of a time-crunch, however, as the main reason for building the application is to connect people who need rides to their polling places with volunteers in the days leading up to the critical 2018 midterm elections.

Here’s the concept: someone in need of a ride calls a Twilio number, which then rings up to ten (10) volunteers’ phones. Whomever picks up first gets the call, and they can work through arranging transportation.

Building the application has been an awesome introduction to telephony service providers like Twilio, which combine voice and SMS messaging with web applications. Using Twilio’s TwiML (Twilio Markup Language), I can write simple XML documents to describe how to respond to different messages. I have a lot of features planned as far as routing calls more intelligently and letting volunteers mark themselves as unavailable, but I wanted to get the bare-bones TwiML out to the public as far ahead of Election Day as possible.

Continue reading→