by Bill Magargal

Servas International (SI) unveiled its greatly improved website version 2.0 in 2024. The development team, led by Jim Leask (Servas Canada) did an outstanding job with this very complex and time-consuming project. It involved negotiating verbiage and design aspects in multiple languages, and interfacing with the hired programmers.

The result was an extremely successful release with very few bugs and minimal disruption. Jim dedicated most of his spare time to the project for about three years to make this happen. He is now ready to help, but not lead, a team to develop a phone App for the SI website. We are hopeful that people will step up to help with the project, and especially someone to fill the leadership role.  

Proposed Features:

The tech team has identified several functions they believe an App should include. If you have suggestions for other functions, please let us know. The current list includes:

Find Hosts: Ability to find hosts, including map-search functionality

Find Members: Host should be able to find members to learn more about them and to see their LOIs.

Communications: A messaging system to help hosts and travelers connect while ensuring all contacts are verified Servas members (not spam or commercial messages) 

Member Profile Editing: Members should be able to easily update and "Confirm" their profiles and LOIs.

Event Searches: The App should be able to easily search out and register for SI sponsored events as well as events hosted by individual groups/nations.

How You Can Help:

The development team can really use "normal" people to help with design and testing phases of the project. Techies often think a particular feature is "obvious", but often it is couched in geek-speak. So regardless of your tech skills, please consider helping out with the App development team.

If you would like to become part of the team, or have questions please contact technology@usservas.org.