CASA Project & Organization Overview

CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) is a role fulfilled by a trained volunteer sworn into a county-level juvenile dependency court system to advocate on behalf of a youth in the corresponding county's foster care system. CASA is also the namesake role of the national organization, CASA, which exists to cultivate and supervise volunteers carrying out this work – with county level chapters (operating relatively independently of each other) across the country.

PG CASA (Prince George's County CASA in Maryland) seeks a volunteer management system to:

• provide volunteers with a portal for logging activity
• oversee volunteer activity
• generate reports on volunteer activity

How CASA works:

• Foster Youth (or case worker associated with Foster Youth) requests a CASA Volunteer.
• CASA chapter pairs Youth with Volunteer.
• Volunteer spends significant time getting to know and supporting the youth, including at court appearances.
• Case Supervisor oversees CASA Volunteer paired with Foster Youth and monitors, tracks, and advises on all related activities.
• At PG CASA, the minimum volunteer commitment is one year (this varies by CASA chapter, in San Francisco the minimum commitment is ~ two years). Many CASA volunteers remain in a Youth's life well beyond their youth. The lifecycle of a volunteer is very long, so there's a lot of activity for chapters to track!

Why?

Many adults circulate in and out of a Foster Youth's life, but very few of them (if any) remain. CASA volunteers are by design, unpaid, unbiased, and consistent adult figures for Foster Youth who are not bound to support them by fiscal or legal requirements.

Project Terminology

• Foster Youth = CasaCase
• CASA Volunteer = Volunteer
• Case Supervisor = Case Supervisor
• CASA Administrator = Superadmin

Project Considerations

• PG CASA is operating under a very tight budget. Right now, they manually input volunteer data into a volunteer management software built specifically for CASA, but upgrading their account for multiple user licenses to allow volunteers to self-log activity data is beyond their budget. Hence why we are building as lightweight a solution as possible that can sustain itself with Ruby for Good's support.
• While the scope of this platform's use is currently only for PG County CASA, we are building with a mind toward multitenancy so this platform could prospectively be used by CASA chapters across the country. We consider PG CASA an early beta tester of this platform.

More information:

Learn more about PG CASA here.

You can read the complete role description of a CASA volunteer in Prince George's County as well.

Want to contribute? Great!

Here is our contributing guide!

Setting up your development environment:

See DOCKER.md for instructions on setting up your environment using Docker. For non-Docker installations, follow the instructions below.

Installing Tools

You'll need Ruby, bundler, node.js, yarn, Postgres, and chromedriver to work on this application.

Bullet points formatted like this are commands you can run on your machine

Ruby

1. Install a ruby version manager: rvm or rbenv
2. when you cd into the project directory, let your version manager install the ruby version in .ruby-version. Right now that's Ruby 2.7.1
3. gem install bundler

node.js

1. Install nvm, which is a node version manager.
2. Install a current LTS version of Node. 12.16.2 works.
3. Make sure yarn is installed. On Ubuntu, make sure you install it from the official Yarn repo instead of cmdtest.

Postgres

1. Make sure that postgres is installed.

• On a Mac, you can use brew install postgres OR brew postgresql-upgrade-database if you have an older version of postgres, or use Postgres.app.
• If you're on Ubuntu/WSL, use sudo apt-get install libpq-dev so the gem can install. Use the Postgres repo for Ubuntu or WSL to get the server and client tools.
• If you're using Docker, do what you need to do.

Mailcatcher

1. Install the Mailcatcher gem: gem install mailcatcher
2. Start mailcatcher on the command line: mailcatcher
3. All mail sent in development can be viewed at http://localhost:1080

Chromedriver

1. Install the current stable release of chromedriver for your operating system so the browser-based Ruby feature/integration tests can run. Installing chromium-browser is enough, even in WSL.

Getting the CASA App Running

(on a Mac or Linux machine)

Setting up your working environment

1. git clone https://github.com/rubyforgood/casa.git clone the repo to your local machine. You should create a fork in GitHub if you don't have permission to commit directly to this repo, though. See our contributing guide for more detailed instructions.
2. cd casa/
3. bundle install to install all the Ruby dependencies.
4. yarn install to install all the Javascript dependencies.
5. bin/rails db:setup requires running local postgres, with a role created for whatever user you're running rails as

Running Tests

1. bin/rails spec to run the Ruby test suite
2. yarn test to run the Javascript test suite

Test coverage is run by simplecov on all builds and aggregated by CodeClimate

Running the development server

1. bin/rails db:seed load sample data into the database
2. bin/rails server run server

Cleaning up before you commit

1. bundle exec standardrb --fix auto-fix Ruby linting issues more linter info
2. bundle exec erblint --lint-all --autocorrect ERB linter
3. yarn lint:fix to run the JS linter and fix isses

If you have any troubles running tests, check out .travis.yml which is what makes the CI build run.

Documentation

There is a doc directory at the top level that includes Architectural Decision Records and entity relationship diagrams of various models.

Common issues

1. If your rake/rake commands hang forever instead of running, try: rails app:update:bin
2. There is currently no option for a user to sign up and create an account through the UI. This is intentional. If you want to log in, use a pre-seeded user account and its credentials.
3. If you are on windows and see the error "Requirements support for mingw is not implemented yet" then use https://rubyinstaller.org/ instead

Ubuntu and WSL

1. If you are on Ubuntu in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and rbenv install indicates that the Ruby version is unavailable, you might be using Ubuntu's default install of ruby-build, which only comes with old installs of Ruby (ending before 2.6.) You should uninstall rvm and ruby-build's apt packages (apt remove rvm ruby-build) and install them with Git like this:

• git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
• echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
• echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
• exec $SHELL
• git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git "$(rbenv root)"/plugins/ruby-build

You'll probably hit a problem where ruby-version reads ruby-2.7.1 but the install available to you is called 2.7.1. If you do, install rbenv-alias and create an alias between the two.

CASA App in the wild

Browsing the staging server

Test users for https://casa-r4g-staging.herokuapp.com/. All passwords are 123456.

1. supervisor1@example.com
2. volunteer1@example.com
3. casa_admin1@example.com

Error tracking

We are currently using https://app.bugsnag.com/ to track errors in staging. Errors post to slack at #casa-bots

Email

This app sends email for user signup and deactivation. We use https://www.sendinblue.com/ because we get 300 free emails a day, which is more than we expect to need.

Sendinblue has historically sometimes been very slow (6 hours) in delivering email, but sometimes it delivers within a minute or two. Be wary.

You log into sendinblue via the "log in with google" option. Sean has the credentials for this and hopefully we never need to change them.

We are not using Mailgun because they limited us to only 5 recipients without a paid plan. We looked at using Sendgrid but our account is currently locked for unknown reasons.

Preview all emails at http://localhost:3000/rails/mailers/volunteer_mailer as configured by volunteer_mailer_preview.rb

Hosting

Namecheap, heroku

Communication and Collaboration

Most conversation happens in the #casa channel of the Ruby For Good slack. Get access here: https://rubyforgood.herokuapp.com/

You can also open an issue or comment on an issue on github and a maintainer will reply to you.

We have a weekly team office hours / hangout on Wednesday 6-8pm Pacific time where we do pair/mob programming and talk about issues. Please stop by!

We have a weekly stakeholder call with PG CASA staff on Wednesday at 8:30am Pacific time where we show off progress and discuss launch plans. Feel free to join!

Join info for all public meetings is posted in the rubyforgood slack in the #casa channel

History

First CASA supervisor training: 12 August 2020 🎉