Family Twinning for Clothes Redistribution

Software	Some object oriented language and database management system
Covers	Information systems development, charity management, probably website development
Skills Required	Programming, database design, systems analysis.
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ?? Programming ??

Brief Description

A lot of fuss gets made about clothes recycling. It sounds like a good idea, but it has severe critics, who point out that dumping western second-hand clothes to be sold off in markets in African countries has a disastrous effect on their indigenous textile industries. It's the wrong model: there are a lot of families not just in the third world but in the poorer parts of Europe who are very grateful for second hand clothes that fit their particular needs - not necessarily particularly poor, just lacking the plentiful sources of cheap second hand clothes we have in Britain. What will get them clothes that won't make a hole in their budgets, especially for children, is a personal relationship with another family who have clothes to give away (maybe two years after picking them up at a flea market). This can be mediated by personal contacts (many of Martin Stacey's son's clothes go to a friend in Paris to pass on to her nephew in Serbia, who is a little bit younger and smaller). But what if there are no personal contacts?

Your challenge in this project is to devise a way for a charitable organization to operate to transfer clothes semi-directly from donors to recipients, and develop an information management system to support its operations. This is most likely to have a database with a web interface to support at least some of the operations of the system being done remotely by the administrators or by clients or donors. The organization might be free-standing, or be an add-on activity for a charity or church or social group whose main interests are something else, or be an umbrella organization for various operations run locally by local groups.

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