NameChangr
NameChangr is a social activism project I created in my spare time. It helps people who are trans or gender-non-conforming generate the paperwork required to legally change their name and gender in Utah. I run a google ad for the project and the system welcomes 70-80 users per month (as of July, 2019). In the same month, there were 6 user registrations.
While not super impressive numbers in the grand scheme of things, it is a surprising amount considering the target market is trans folks early in their transition who are interested in changing their legal names.
The site has an instructions page where I have written about the steps in the name change process, and if a user registers
they gain access to the application generator which generates the packet. To generate the documents,
I took the court documents in docx format and added ${tokens} to it. I am then able to replace the tokens with the
user-entered values using the excellent PHPWord library. I built a framework
around the process, and if someone implements another state it should be as easy as providing a template and inheriting some traits.
At the time I was evaluating Heroku for another project, and NameChangr needed a home. Heroku appealed to me because of the ephemeral nature of its containers and the free account has enough time to host NameChangr for free. The idea that a site could be turned off and only turned on as needed is extremely interesting to me, and dynamic scaling is something I had not had the pleasure of experimenting with at the time. I enjoyed using it, and having a all the Heroku features available allowed me to configure other components like the database, emails, and NewRelic monitoring extremely quickly. If the time comes, scaling up should be incredibly easy, and I’m looking forward to it!
NameChangr is a an ongoing project, and I’d be delighted for other socially conscious individuals to participate in expanding its reach into other states, or with help maintaining it. I have made a bit of a framework that should make it easy to add another state — I think the hardest part is data collection and formatting the document packet.
NameChangr is open source, so why not visit me on github: https://github.com/Darunada/namechangr