Discuss about the Neighborly Shared Food Group.
This report is about Neighborly Shared Food (NSF). NSF is a food sharing cooperative in the inner city of Auckland. NSF was formed in 2015 by three neighbors who wanted to avoid unnecessary wastage of food. The three contacted other neighbors who were vegetable and fruit growers for their own consumption, and as a result, they came up with Neighborly Shared Food. They elected a community representative and also set up a Facebook page to communicate with other members and exchange extra food. NSF increased in popularity, and as a result, the community representatives decided to increase their cooperative activities and so decided to build an online system to support their activities.
The new online system would be of gigantic gain to future community representatives. This is so because the new system will eliminate paperwork, support many tasks at once, make it easy to share and receive information (Clewell, Aronson, & Society for Ecological Restoration International, 2013) and also make it easy for new members to apply. The new system would also make it easy for the organization of members’ details and the registration of new members. It will also make it possible for the administration and users to track the activities of their group.
Users and stakeholders of the system include members of NSF, members of the community, proposed online users and the members of the financial district. Members of NSF include the founders and registered members who contribute directly as vegetable and fruit growers or those that participate indirectly by buying the produce from those selling. Online members are also an important part of NSF since they contribute a great deal in advertising and marketing by ‘telling a friend to tell a friend.’ The banking community is the bank where the cooperative society members keep their returns, get their loans whenever necessary and also get financial advice.
Functional requirements are those requirements that delineate the function (s) or one or more components of the proposed system. The online system introduced by the members should consider some of the functional requirements that will be critical to the system. Some of the functional requirements may include; interface (back-end and front-end), business requirements and compliance.
The interface of the proposed system is very important. The back-end and front-end design of the proposed system should be considered. The back-end part of the system includes those that are managed by technicians so that the end users can access whatever they want in an easy and convenient manner. The back-end should be well documented to give those who might debug the system at a later date easy time. The front-end should be made in a way that is attractive to the users. In addition to attraction, it should be easy to use and interact with. There should also be a customer care platform to address customer issues. The platform should be interactive to make it possible for users to get help whenever they encounter any problems or find it difficult to use the online system (Lovelace & IBM, 2014).
It is important to take note that the business requirements are very important. The proposed system should be in line with the business requirements of NSF. The proposed system should be able to satisfy the goal of the members of NFS and make it easy for them to do business and manage their stuff. The proposed system should be compliant to international standards (Pollack, 2016). The proposed online system should be well tailored to ensure that it meets the purpose it was made for.
Non-functional requirements for the proposed online NFS system are performance, scalability, reliability, security, capacity, and availability (Todinov, 2015). The non-functional requirements support the system making it perform optimally. The system should be designed with scalability in mind. The database management system used should accept a significant amount of data. The whole system should be made in a way that it accepts growth and grows with the growing number of members.
The system should be reliable. The proposed system will consist of various components that will work together to achieve a common goal (Zavou, Keromytis & Columbia University, 2015). Community representatives and other users, hardware resources, software resources and database management system all comprise the proposed system. The components have to work together in an efficient and effective manner to achieve performance. A system that performs as it should is handy when using it to make decisions regarding the maintenance of the system, making good business decisions, as well as evaluating and managing investment projects (Port, 2013).Activities from the input, process to output should be synchronized to ensure that the system is reliable and functions as it should be.
The system should be secure. Security is a very critical component of any information system today. Given the hostile environment today caused by hackers and malicious individuals, it is essential that those coming up with any computerized system make it their business to make their operations secure and safe from these malicious parties (Simpson, 2016). Database security should be implemented to ensure that the integrity of stored data is not interfered with. The online system should be encrypted to make it secure. The communication of members with the system should have an end to end encryption to make it secure and protect the system from unauthorized access or manipulation (Boddington, 2016).
The system should support availability. The users should be able to access critical system services whenever they need them (Bauer, Adams, & Wiley, 2012). The members of NFS should be able to log into the system and use it concurrently. The system should support several users at a time making it possible for more than one user to access the system and use the system. The system should take issues seriously to deal with availability so that authorized users can have access to those functionalities that they want. All users from vegetable and fruit growers, community representatives, online members and technical people responsible for administering the system should be able to have access to the system by their access privileges. Access privilege ensures that users do not interfere with the system by abusing their access rights unnecessarily.
Users that would interact with the online system according to the access privilege levels granted. Other users will be granted only read permission, others read/write and others super-user privileges (Jeffery & Schubert, 2017). The access rights of each user should be well defined to eliminate chances of users abusing the system. The proposed system should be made in such a way that the users cannot easily escalate their access privilege rights (Rocha, 2013). This helps keep the system safe and easy to manage.
There are those who could be given only read permission like customers who buy vegetables and fruits. They can only be able to view the prices posted and be able to order for whatever they want through the platform provided. Vegetable and fruit growers may be given read and write permission to make it possible for them to view prices for their produce and even be able to post the prices that they would like their produce to go for. The system administrator may have the capability of modifying the system and correct any errors that may arise as a result of system software errors, hardware problems or user errors (Lambert & Kanopy, 2016).
The core functional feature of the system is to provide up to date information to the members. All the activities intended to be carried out will be posted by the community representatives on the online platform that is being made. This makes it possible for members to access information and to follow the activities of NFS. This also improves the outreach of NFS to the community thereby improving their sales and exchange with all the stakeholders involved. The system also makes it easy for new members to register and follow the activities of NFS. The information stored also makes it easy for the management to follow the records of their members since it easy to manage electronic records compared to handling manual documents.
The system belonging to NFS has to create a backup system that will be relied upon when one or more critical functionalities of the system are down or interfered with. The implementers of the proposed system came up with an incremental back-up system. Back-up is meant to protect NFS against data loss, corruption or disasters (natural or instigated). The incremental back-up system was chosen to identify and store only those data that had changed since the last back-up like for example, a list of newly registered members and their contributions since the last back-up. The backed up data is kept off-site (Kurtz, 2012) to prevent loss or destruction by natural phenomena or malicious humans.
The back-up is scheduled to take place twice every week. One takes place on Monday, and another one is done on Friday. Incremental back-up was chosen to eliminate duplication of data and unnecessary wastage of storage media. The back-up scheme is supposed to be numbered across levels with back-up n done on Monday and back-up n-1 done on Friday.
Whenever it is necessary to get any data from the back-up, the person charged with the administration of the system uses their access privilege right of read/write to be able to access the stored files. The system administrator then mirrors the storage media to the original storage devices so that they can be accessed when needed (Orlando & IBM, 2016).
Conclusion
The proposed system will improve the activities of Neighborly Shared Food. NSF will be able to reach out to members of the society through their proposed system. The proposed system will improve service delivery, improve tracking of their activities and management of member information. Therefore, it is a good idea to come up with the online system to aid the members of the Neighborly Shared Food to sell their products and also buy from other members those products that they do not produce.
References
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Clewell, A. F., Aronson, J., & Society for Ecological Restoration International. (2013). Ecological restoration: Principles, values, and structure of an emerging profession. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Jeffery, K., & Schubert, L. (January 01, 2017). PaaSage. Ieee Cloud Computing, 4, 3.)
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