Syrian Emergency Task Force

The Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) is a civil organization established in March 2011 to support the demand of the Syrian people for freedom and democracy, irrespective of ethnicity, region, or background. SETF advocates in solidarity with the Syrian people to inform the American public and its representatives about their suffering while addressing the colossal humanitarian crisis and promoting the development of the Syrian civil society based on respect for human dignity and freedom.

SETF offers humanitarian support and funds to those who live inside the war zone. They focus on Internally Displaced People, specifically orphans, besieged civilians, and those in most need. To advance these efforts, SETF was looking for a partner who could not only help develop a mobile application – but one who was also sympathetic to the humanitarian issues involved. As a result, Metova was chosen to deliver the right strategy, design, and technology solution.

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Research, Strategy & Tech Assessment

Metova, as a part of the volunteering program “MetoValue”, offered support to the SETF team to create a native app on both the iOS and Android platform where people can get alerted to any type of reported attack in the Syrian war zone to safeguard as many people’s lives as possible.
Metova created a secure application to share updates on attacks, including a specific map of the location and type of attack, as well as specific comments seeking to increase awareness and provide assistance for the Syrian population.

The Syria Watch app receives notifications as soon as the SETF team creates them. Alerts occur in real-time as well as a historical view of recent activity which includes: the attack type, severity, description, and location. These alerts can also be shared to increase awareness outside of the mobile application.

Metova assisted the SETF with the feature definition, customer experience, visual design, and the development plan to deliver a complete solution to be administered directly by their team.

Approach and Challenge

One of the many challenges caused by the ongoing conflict situation in Syria is alerting civilians about areas of possible or current attacks by armed forces.

Having accurate and prompt information on conflicts is crucial to keeping the most unprotected people safe, which created a need to have a simple design focused on the most urgent needs: timely attack alerts which can quickly be used to determine key information about location and severity.

Metova specializes in creating custom software solutions with a key focus on service industries, the connected home, vehicle, and the Internet of Things.

The SETF and Metova teams identified key challenge areas for delivering the necessary solution:
1. Lack of control of the most crucial data.
2. No existing standard format for attack alerts.
3. The mixed timeline within to properly label and distribute the alerts.

After a study of the general problem and a series of tests and adjustments within the current development process by Metova, a solution was defined to where the SETF team can publish alerts in an easy, fast, and efficient way, to ensure a wide distribution of crucial information.

Development and Delivery

Metova built native mobile applications to be used as a platform for the SETF team to broadcast this critical information as well as to create a channel for the public to receive information.

Metova’s key development challenge was to design and build an easy to use application that could be used by both sides, the SETF team and the public in general. All while having time and resource limitations bound by the volunteer effort by Metova and the limited bandwidth of the SETF team.

To solve these challenges, Metova assembled a team dedicated to specifically assist this humanitarian effort and worked to create an application that could be used by anyone with a simple and straightforward design as well as a quick and effortless way to create and broadcast the notifications.

Quality

Metova is always focused on delivering the best possible product, which utilizes a well-defined QA process to ensure our design and delivery requirements exceeded SETF expectations.

We have a suite of automated and manual test cases that verify functionality, performance, and stability. Using Metova’s Testrail integration a suite of testing was maintained for three basic sections on the app: the admin flow to trigger alerts and updates, the timelines available to all mobile users, and the real-time notifications.

This ensures that the application and its functionalities will continue to help SETF meet their goals within the Syrian community by providing a framework to create and distribute alerts while providing the public access to this critical information.

A Complete Solution

Metova’s approach to helping our partners follows our core phases of engagement:

With The Syrian Emergency Task Force, Metova provided turnkey solutions to help identify a need and opportunity in the business, define and design solutions to meet those needs, and then develop and launch these solutions to meet their customer needs and continue to help grow their business.

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