CommunityHub

Project Overview

TorontoJS CommunityHub is an open-source volunteer management system (VMS) built by and for the TorontoJS community. We provided project management, lead development, and software engineering contributions to build a platform that centralizes volunteer onboarding, team organization, role-based access control, and engagement tracking into a single source of truth. It replaces fragmented spreadsheets and manual processes with a modern, serverless web application—while also providing hands-on, real-world project experience for community members looking to grow their careers.

Client Challenges

TorontoJS managed volunteer data across disconnected tools—spreadsheets, Slack threads, and email lists—leading to fragmented information, slow onboarding, and zero visibility into volunteer engagement over time. Organizers had no centralized way to assign roles, track contributions, or manage teams, and new volunteers faced unnecessary friction just to get started. The project needed strong technical leadership to coordinate an 18+ person contributor team and drive the architecture forward.

Our Solution

• Project Management & Technical Leadership: We led sprint planning, code reviews, and contributor coordination—ensuring consistent progress across frontend and backend workstreams while mentoring junior developers.
• Lead Development & Architecture: Designed and implemented the core application architecture, including the serverless API on Cloudflare Workers with Hono, the D1 database schema and migrations, and the React multi-page frontend with Vite.
• Software Engineering Contributions: Hands-on development across the full stack—building the authentication system, role-based access control, multi-step onboarding flow, team management, and transactional email integration with Resend.

Key Features

• Volunteer Profile Management: Complete profile creation, editing, and listing—giving organizers a searchable directory of all community members and their skills.
• Team Organization: Create and manage teams, assign members, and structure volunteer groups with appropriate permissions for different community functions.
• Event Logging & Data Export: Comprehensive activity tracking with automated daily data exports via scheduled cron jobs, providing full observability into volunteer engagement.
• Transactional Email System: Automated emails via Resend for account confirmation, password resets, and notifications—with environment-specific configuration and local dev fallbacks.
• Auto-Generated API Documentation: OpenAPI spec with Swagger UI at /api/docs, making it easy for contributors to understand and extend the API.

Results & Impact

• Onboarding Efficiency: Cut volunteer onboarding from 2+ hours of manual back-and-forth down to under 10 minutes with a self-service flow—a 92% reduction in time-to-active, eliminating organizer bottlenecks and scaling community growth.
• Data Visibility: Organizers now have real-time access to volunteer profiles, team structures, and engagement history—enabling data-driven decisions about community management for the first time.
• Community Growth: With 18+ contributors and 1,700+ commits, the project itself became a vehicle for skill development—giving TorontoJS members production experience with TypeScript, React, Cloudflare Workers, and modern API design.
• Performance: Fully serverless architecture on Cloudflare’s edge network delivers sub-100ms API responses globally with automatic scaling and zero infrastructure maintenance.