Help Folks get to The Energy Fair by Setting up a Ride-share Forum in Wordpress

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The Midwest Renewable Energy Association (MREA) is a non-profit organization located in Central Wisconsin whose mission is to expand access to solar and renewable energy through training and grassroots sustainability events.

The Energy Fair, hosted by MREA each year at our headquarters in Custer WI, is the largest and longest running sustainability event of its kind in the nation. Many fair attendees travel from around the Midwest to attend our event and want to travel to the fair in an efficient and sustainable fashion. One way to accomplish that is to ride share.

We are interested in setting up a website to facilitate the creation and implementation of ride sharing to the fair. This website should be implemented as a forum where registered users can post their intent to travel to the fair and advertise that they have seats available in their vehicles or post their interest in traveling to the fair from their location. Any user to the site should be able to view posts, but only registered users should be able to post or reply to posts. The forum should also allow for the sending of private messages so users can share their personal contact information (we should discourage, or even block if possible, users from posting their email addresses, phone numbers or home addresses to the forum) to better arrange their rideshare. Steps should be taken to block spam and prevent non-authentic registrations.

MREA uses Wordpress to build its websites. MREA will supply a domain with an install of Wordpress and an admin login. Our current recommendation is to use Buddypress, but we are willing to entertain other solutions if they prove to be easily maintainable, robust and secure. The expectation is not necessarily to write custom code, but to use off the shelf plugins to accomplish the task.

The project should be completed by late March 2018.

You will be working with MREA’s IT Manager, Volunteer Coordinator and some other stakeholders (primarily for review). We will have a kickoff meeting to go over requirements, ensure understanding and set a schedule. Weekly update meetings will take place with the IT Manager and other stakeholders. There will be a final review and demonstration to ensure that all features are working as desired.