Heard about this Code for America project through the TED radio hour podcast on Collaboration. http://www.npr.org/2013/10/04/19...
The northeast has trouble keeping important things plowed during the winter, like fire hydrants. So someone hacked together a weekend project to let people "Adopt" a hydrant near them: meaning name it, pledge to take care of it, and dig it out when it snowed.
It's since been open-sourced and used in a lot of other use cases, and CoA uses this to point out that government doesn't have to suck when it comes to tech.
Hi all!
I’m the “someone” who hacked together this product as a Code for America Fellow. As Jonathan mentioned, the code is all open source and was written to be flexible, so it can be used by different municipalities with different types of civic infrastructure they want to put up for adoption. For example, a fork of this project is now being used by the city of Honolulu, Hawaii (of all places) to adopt tsunami warning sirens. http://sirens.honolulu.gov/
It’s been amazing to watch this organic growth, without having any sales or marketing budget to speak of.
Feel free to ask me any questions about the product and I’ll do my best to respond.
CryptoPoops
Breaker