At the last edition of RHoK in June 2011, a group of developers from Trento built a prototype of a mobile web application to fight food wastage. The application - called BringTheFood - allows donors (suppliers) to post ‘still eatable food‘ by specifying the detail of the food (a short description of the food, the available and expire period of the food, number of people the food can serve, and the address at which the food can be picked) and collectors first should book an offer (i.e., a food) and collect it before the expiration period. BTF does not deal with food distribution to the actual food seekers. BTF has also a mechanism to encourage food donors to actively participate by providing rewards.

We would like to expand the features of BTF in order to make it smarter and to use it to encourage food donations, in developed countries as well as in areas struck by famine.

• Enhanced Reward Model: The computation of the current rewarding system is a simple model based on the number of people served by the food donated by the donor. We are looking for a "smarter" way to rate donors and collectors, to be integrated with the application, and we ask hackers to devise a reward mechanism to improve participation by giving incentives to occasional donors.
• Smart Searching and Filtering of Offers. In big cities there might be a reasonably large number of offers. The current implementation of BTF just displays all the available offers in sequential order according to the date of expiration and also displays nearby offers (with respect to the collector) on a map.  This can pose a problem for the collector to find the right offer.  BTF should allow the collector to search offers according to certain keywords (e.g., the type of food s/he looking for, location, and with in a certain range of distance).  Some foods (e.g., meat) have also religious importance (e.g., halal food), thus the new feature should provide a facility to the collector to specific such categories. The searching can be refined by, e.g.,  food type, location, date of post, (and from which supplier).  The platform could also recommend the collector based on his query, and some heuristics (e.g., by applying machine learning techniques).
• Logistic support. Currently, BTF has a ‘distributor’ concept. These are volunteers who coordinate with ‘collectors’ to facilitate the actual food distribution. Since the food collectors sometimes look for volunteers not only to distribute the food but also to collect from the offered place,  collectors would like to post their needs to look for volunteers for picking and distributing the food in order to optimize routes and reduce costs.  At the moment, BTF does not facilitate such logistic support. Therefore, we want to introduce logistics support (as a service) to the current implementation of BTF, to arrange transport of foods, supporting communication between collector and logistic support providers. For example, the collector can broadcast (by SMS) to the subscribed ‘transporters’ through SMS (or another means) for available transport and organize the actual logistic.