Communications of the ACM
We Can Code It!
Idealistic coders and designers can help cities.
Credit: Mother Jones
In the winter of 2011, a handful of software engineers landed in Boston just ahead of a crippling snowstorm. They were there as part of Code for America, a program that places idealistic young coders and designers in city halls across the country for a year. They'd planned to spend it building a new website for Boston's public schools, but within days of their arrival, the city all but shut down and the coders were stuck fielding calls in the city's snow emergency center.
In such snowstorms, firefighters can waste precious minutes finding and digging out hydrants. A city employee told the CFA team that the planning department had a list of street addresses for Boston's 13,000 hydrants. "We figured, 'Surely someone on the block with a shovel would volunteer if they knew where to look,'" says Erik Michaels-Ober, one of the CFA coders. So they got out their laptops.
Now, Boston has adoptahydrant.org, a simple website that lets residents "adopt" hydrants across the city. The site displays a map of little hydrant icons. Green ones have been claimed by someone willing to dig them out after a storm, red ones are still available—500 hydrants were adopted last winter.
From The Guardian
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