We-Q — A virtual queue management
The COVID-19 pandemic came and detrimentally affected our lives in numerous ways. We could not even go to shops and buy our daily needful due to the fear embedded in us.
When the breakdown point came, people started violating rules of social distancing. Citizens near my house were standing close to each other in front of grocery shops, ration shops and banks. You can check out this blog by DNA India to understand its gravity.
What came across my mind was if I could help reduce this at a local level which can spread awareness. I looked up the concept of virtual queues. It was very fascinating how virtual queues could solve this problem. Not only the problem of social distancing but in general it is very useful in crowd management. In a country like India people have priorities and are in a hurry to do everything. Thus, people tend to not follow lines or way of work in a disciplined manner.
Now, the question is what is a virtual queue? It is a ordered queue managed by an application where the user selects a time and books a slot for the work he/she has to do. Thus, they need to be only physically present at the booked time. This becomes beneficial for the users too, as their time and effort is saved. For a better understanding you can jump to this site.
Now, the fact is that we have such companies like Qminder(who has written the article above) who have made the virtual queue management systems. However, these are paid and only corporates who are aware of such a thing will be able to use it. I want to implement it on a local level which impacts the society the most. I want to make this project free to be used by anyone.
My colleagues , namely Mayesh Mohapatra and Umang Mishra were eager to help me on this. We decided to work on it step by step. We were new to this, so understanding the basics was important for us. Currently we are still developing this system. We have not made any fancy UI to appease the audience as such but we have built the crux of it. We are still working on it’s back end.
Once the application is developed we would post it on google play and it would be free to use. The project is open source and any help regarding its development is welcome. Here is the link to the project repository.
Let me know your thoughts about it. You can email me at- arinjoy31@gmail.com
