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.
Screenshot from Adopt-a-Hydrant Code for America
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.
Maybe that doesn't seem like a lot, but consider what the city pays
to keep it running: $9 a month in hosting costs. "I figured that even
if it only led to a few fire hydrants being shoveled out, that could be
the difference between life or death in a fire, so it was worth doing,"
Michaels-Ober says. And because the CFA team open-sourced the code,
meaning they made it freely available for anyone to copy and modify,
other cities can adapt it for practically pennies. It has been deployed
in
Providence,
Anchorage, and
Chicago. A Honolulu city employee heard about Adopt-a-Hydrant after cutbacks slashed his budget, and now Honolulu has
Adopt-a-Siren, where volunteers can sign up to check for dead batteries in tsunami sirens across the city. In Oakland, it's
Adopt-a-Drain.
Sounds great, right? These simple software solutions could save
lives, and they were cheap and quick to build. Unfortunately, most
cities will never get a CFA team, and most can't afford to keep a stable
of sophisticated programmers in their employ, either. For that matter,
neither can many software companies in Silicon Valley; the talent wars
have gotten so bad that even brand-name tech firms have been forced to
offer employees a bonus of upwards of $10,000 if they help recruit an
engineer.
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