Alia

Places to stay for missionaries

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Inspiration

The name Alia comes from the Hebrew for "room" used in 2 Kings 2:10 where the Shunammite woman creates a room for Elisha to stay in when he passes through. Our app exists to help missionaries find people like Alia. Alia.tech allows missionaries locate spaces to stay while fundraising or traveling stateside. Working at a seminary we have seen multiple people head out to the mission field. From time to time these people need to return to the US for fundraising, healthcare, and rest.

Sometimes these needs are sudden and unexpected and finding a place to stay can be difficult. A couple years ago, a mission team went out from Sojourn Community Church. After an extremely difficult first year, they returned to the states to regroup and fundraise. Many of them struggled to find places to stay. Many members of our churches have extra rooms, beds, apartments, or homes which they could open up for missionaries if only there was a way to connect them with missionaries in need. Alia connects missionaries in the US with free places to stay, utilizing the resources and generosity of the local church, inviting church members to take a larger part in fulfilling the Great Commission.

What it does

Users create accounts with which they can search for places to stay or list places to stay. Users create listings of properties that they are willing to open up for missionaries to stay in. Missionaries can create a request to stay at a location, and the location owner can approve or decline the request. When searching, missionaries can filter by location, the number of nights, and the number of beds.

How we built it

  • Alia.tech resides on an AWS EC2 instance with a MySQL database on AWS RDS. It uses SSL/HTTPS.
  • Alia is built in PHP with the Laravel MVC framework.
  • Alia also utilizes the Algolia Places API to resolve addresses to latitude and longitude coordinates.
  • We used bootstrap, Vue.js, and jQuery for the front end.
  • We used MySQL creating 8 tables: users, churches, listings, messages, availabilities, stays, password_resets (default table), and listing_images.

Challenges we ran into

  • Vetting people for a service like this could be difficult. We decided to make that church based. The user would have their church's contact associated with their account, so users could verify each other by contacting the other individual's church.

What we learned

  • We learned how to automate DB seeding via Faker.
  • One of our teammates learned how to use the Laravel framework, and another team member learned both PHP and Laravel.
  • With the short timeframe, we learned how to better divide up the work to be done and how to produce a product collaboratively more quickly.

What's next for Alia

  • We were unable to complete the messaging part of our app. Ideally, users would not have to exchange any contact information to discuss details about the stay. This messaging feature would allow hosts and guests to communicate without revealing personal information.
  • In order to prevent abuse of the app, we plan to associate church information with each user. This would allow a missionary to contact someone at the host's church to confirm the identity and reputation of the host. Likewise, a host could contact someone at the missionary's church.
  • We need to finish implementing the availabilities portion of the app. Location owners should be able to list dates for which their location is available, and missionaries should be able to search based on available dates.

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