Mutual Aid Wiki: a unified source of information on mutual aid groups throughout the world

This resource combines community maintained sources with individual submissions to provide a unified source of information on mutual aid groups.

It hopes to enable individuals to connect with their mutual aid communities and to enable mutual aid communities find each other, share approaches and support one another.

This project started with covidmutualaid.org but has been opened up to efforts outside the UK when mutual aid groups in other countries began appearing on the map. Now it aims to support other mutual aid initiatives by providing this data either through an embeddable map or as a public API for other mapping initiatives.

Background

This project began as a map that synced with a google sheet of mutual aid groups in the UK. It now enables:

• Groups to add and edit their information
• Groups to draw polygons to indicate the area they encompass
• Individuals to verify their email with a group in order to edit it
• Syncing with other sources of mutual aid groups data through the code in external-data

It is deployed with serverless on AWS using dynamoDB. Typescript is used throughout with React.js on the client and RxJS on the lambdas.

Use our data

Our data is available as the embeddable map, or as an endpoint that can be queried directly from your client: https://mutualaid.wiki/api/group/get

This data is made available on a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The attribution helps us provide this resource to more communities ❤️.

Contribute data

Submit a pull request to sync with an external source. Helper functions to parse group data and to handle syncing are in the mutual-aid-wiki/lambdas/services/external-data/ directory. Existing sources can be found inside the sources directory also inside.

Participate

We are looking for developers to integrate community maintained lists of groups and maintain and improve this resource. We are also looking for volunteers to help us with outreach and community support.

Getting started

Clone the repository

• rename EXAMPLE-env.json to env.json and add in the relevant values (if you are interested in long term collaboration, let us know and we can give you our keys)
• Run yarn install
• Run yarn start

If you run yarn start:client you should be able to work on the frontend directly as it will proxy all API requests to the https://staging.mutualaid.wiki/ API.

Structure

A Lambda function scrapes the existing google docs spreadsheet for all the groups, geocodes these groups from the provided location string and populates a serverless instance of DynoDB with the entries (removing duplicates). Several more Lambda functions sit in front of this to provide a minimal REST API for the client

The client pulls the (large) array of all the geocoded groups and renders it into an interactive map, enabling users to sort by distance against a provided address. A separate UI is also provided that enables users to add groups.

Built with

• Serverless
• Typescript
• React
• Google Maps API

Check the package.json file for commands to run the client and server separately