Avandar v0.1

The first official version of Avandar v0.1 has been released. Avandar is still in alpha, meaning it is currently not ready for production and still only open for user testers, but, as promised, I am building this platform in the open. That means I will keep the community updated on the platform’s progress and decisions.

Avandar as a Platform

Avandar is intended as a platform rather than a singular product. That means it is being built as a collection of products–an ecosystem. Consider how Google Drive is actually a collection of products that all communicate with each other: docs, sheets, forms, etc. Avandar is a collection of data products that work together to solve the social sector’s problems.

The long-term vision is to be a platform where users can build their own products and plugins, thus allowing the community to take Avandar to whole new levels of customizability. Think of how WordPress has enabled an entire marketplace of plugins, allowing people to build entire websites from scratch with all kinds of functionality. Avandar’s product vision is to be the plugin ecosystem for all social sector operations.

Starting Ecosystem

Avandar is still a long way away from its full vision, but it has to start somewhere. So, for v0.1 the platform is starting with an initial set of three products.

Data Import

Avandar supports manual CSV uploads and connecting directly to Google Sheets. Most impressively, Avandar can support processing millions of rows directly in the browser. Datasets that are too large to open in your computer can actually be opened and visualized in Avandar within seconds. Take a look at this feature demo to see how we process 3.8 million rows of COVID data (420 MB of data that Excel can’t even open).

As I’ve mentioned before, most of the social sector does not have Big Data. Thanks to that, I can take tools that Big Tech companies have mostly used in expensive data orchestration architectures, and repurpose them for highly efficient small-scale data processing. By using DuckDB WASM, Avandar can process millions of rows without ever needing to touch a server.

In the works:

• Airtable integration
• Excel spreadsheet processing
• Providing opt-in cloud storage for uploaded CSVs.
• Query slicing: analyzing a query to make intelligent guesses of its data boundaries, so we only need to load slices of data into memory, rather than a full dataset. This will be pivotal to increase the amount of data Avandar can handle by another order of magnitude.

Data Explorer

Avandar offers a no-code UI to query datasets and visualize them in a table, bar chart, line chart, or scatterplot. Check out the video above to see how we can easily query and visualize 3.8 million rows of COVID data.

In the works:

• UI settings to customize the visualizations
• Ability to publish visualizations, export as images, and embed into websites
• Dashboard-building
• Natural language querying using LLMs
• Data export

Profile designer

Data integration and visualization is only the first half of the battle. The second major data problem nonprofits face is in the day-to-day management of their operations. Program staff often struggle to have the information they need when they need it in order to work with their clients or community.

The Profile Designer is where an organization can define the real-world concepts their data represents. For example, let’s say an organization needs to track and manage volunteers, but the data representing volunteers is spread out everywhere. A volunteer’s name and contact info might be in a Google spreadsheet but the projects they’ve worked on are in Airtable. In the Profile Designer, an organization can create a “Volunteer” profile, select which fields they’d like to track, and specify which data sources they come from. This will create a page for each volunteer, loaded with all the correct data.

In the following video, we use the Profile Designer to create a “US State” profile to view aggregated COVID data alongside relevant State demographic data, such as population.

It doesn’t matter what your organization tracks: warehouses, vaccines, clients, patients, etc. Any “thing,” “object,” or “resource” can be a “profile.” Just say what fields you need and what data sources to pull it from, and Avandar will create the profile pages for you.**

In the works:

• Ability to manage profiles, such as assigning profiles to team members and tracking their status.
• Ability to manually create new profiles and edit fields.
• Ability to create calculated fields, for example you may want a profile to have a field which is actually an aggregation or calculation based on other fields.

Any “thing,” “object,” or “resource” can be a “profile.” Just say what fields you need and what data sources to pull it from, and Avandar will create the profile pages for you.

Contributing

If you are a developer that wants to contribute back to the platform, feel free to look through our GitHub issues, or open a GitHub discussion asking where you can start. I would be happy to set up a call with you to onboard you as an open source contributor. I am in the process of setting up official documentation to help people get started faster, so stay tuned for that.

If you are not a developer, there are still many ways to contribute. There are several ways to support the open source platform with written documentation, marketing materials, and UI/UX design, or graphic design.

Acknowledgements

Lastly, I wanted to give a huge thanks to Olivia Mora and Demian Sims, both of whom had committed to 3-month contracts and have now rolled off the project. As product manager, Olivia Mora was incredible in bringing structure and direction to the many verticals of the product. As a software engineer, Demian Sims actively improved the platform’s UI/UX and closed a myriad of bugs, having pushed 43 improvements in 3 months, and still has 4 PRs left for me to review! I cannot thank you both enough for the trust you placed in me and this company’s vision.