Situation: Many refugees have pets at home and either leave them in the Ukraine or bring them along on their dangerous journey. For those who bring them along the borders can be a difficult situation.

What happens at the border exactly?

What happens or has to be done to the pets arriving in Germany?

Idea: As an additional feature, people can search for a place for their pets or people "apply" to take care of animals. Some people may cannot host people, but they can take care of animals and I believe that many refugees would be more than grateful if they knew their pet is taken good care of.

Information:

Rules in Germany:

• Vaccination and 21-day quarantine of the animals is mandatory
• You will receive a microchip, an animal ID card and a rabies vaccination
• Volunteers need at least a two-room apartment to keep the dog or cat away from people and other animals. If an animal is taken in, helpers must also notify the local veterinary office using a form. Medical officers can then check whether the quarantine conditions are really met

to be continued

Let's create flyers (in business card size) with the website and important numbers on it

Front hostrefugees.eu [LOGO]

Back Getting Started / Починаємо hostrefugees.eu/getting-started Police / Поліція: 110 Ambulance / Швидка допомога : 112

We want to ensure that refugees arrive safe at their temporary home, so we need a safety check for the Guest and Host.

Current Idea: When the guest arrives at the hosts place, both parties confirm the safety check on the website. If the safety check is not confirmed within 24 hours, we will get in touch with both parties.

Future Ideas:

• Add additional safety checks after x days / weeks?
• Additional questions to check the correctness of the place offering

Let's offer a feature to show activities, places, and other things around you based on the guests place location or a manual search (for everyone that is not being hosted)

Activities can be

• free sports offerings from sport clubs
• donation centers that give out clothes, food, and other essentials
• ...

Often the hosts want to register but don't have photos of their ID or passport at hand. We should remove the verification from the onboarding flow but that doesn't mean we will remove it completely. The user can upload the documents at a later point on the profile tab.

The verification is still mandatory before an accommodation is listed on the page.

It would be a nice gesture and feature to be able to send a decline message. Currently the host can either accept or decline the request. Either way, but imo more importantly for declining, it would be nice for the host to send a little message with the decline. Maybe stating the reason or any other kind of message.

This would be in the feature group of chat functionality.

Accommodations are still rare and to improve the user experience from not finding anything new we will add a guest waiting list.

A guest can register on the platform and enable the waiting list feature. Then we will send out an email with new accommodations once a day to those users.

In the future we could improve this feature by adding filter conditions so that we show only relevant accommodations to that guest.

A friend of mine recently said that she would like to host a refugee but that she'd only feel comfortable taking in women. Right now, as a host she could decline a male refugee, right? But we could make this process more smooth by including a feature for this?

We implemented the automatic translation for free text fields of places. This feature should be integrated for posts as well since they are in different languages.

Should the user be able to enable the free text translation for every post separately or do we have a global option to automatically translate everything in the selected language?

How do we unsure that only people in need are using the service without making the process too complicated? Do we add ID / passport verification and/or a refugee status check?

Current Implementation: After a host accepts a guest to their place, both receive an email with the following information:

• Full Name
• Address
• Email / Phone number
• Hosts and Guests languages
• An info text to contact each other and to arrange the arrival

Improvement Ideas

• The email should be available in English and the first language of the guest
• The host can enter arrival instructions for each place
• Should we offer an InApp chat functionality? (Emails are so old school)

Currently the host lists their accommodation and the guest can apply for it. We would like to extend the feature for the opposite use case, meaning a guest can create a request and a host can offer their accommodation to them.

The People Request will have similar properties like the accommodation model.

• How many people?
• Adults, Children
• Bring any pets?
• Additional information
• Optional Profile Picture

The Pets Request must have additional properties.

• Name, Age, Type, optional picture
• Vaccinations?
• Insured?
• For Dogs, chipped?
• Information regarding behavior
• "Do's and Dont's"
• additional important information, such as illness, intolerances, preferences, etc.
• documents available? (vaccination card, insurance, etc.)

ref https://github.com/timokoenig/hostrefugees/issues/21

In addition to information about refugees, we should also put the focus on the hosts. For them, it is also a new situation and it can be rather difficult to gather all the information on what to do, what to look out for, and in general important information to know.

To further improve the feature activities around you, we will add places around you. These places are

• Behörden
• Anlaufstellen
• Hospitals
• Police Stations
• ...

In the future we can show matching places and activities based on the guests accommodation.

Hosts get asked a lot of questions and are expected to always have the answer to it. Most of the time this is not the case and the guest doesn't know where to go from there. HostRefugees should have a discussion section like Github Discussions or StackOverflow.

A Guest can ask a question and other users can give their answer or opinion to it.

The post author can accept the right answer to make it easier for others.

Posts and comments can integrate some sort of automatic translation to include everyone in those discussions.

A feature like this needs at least one moderator to keep the discussions free from political opinions and other extreme content.

Let's create a starter kit that includes important information and useful links.

• Where to find what?
• Important phone numbers
• Links to Government websites
• Activities
• Basic German words