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 Bostons 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 doesnt 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, its 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 cant 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. In fact, even as the Department of Labor predicts the nation will add 1.2 million new computer-science-related jobs by 2022, were graduating proportionately fewer computer science majors than we did in the 1980s, and the number of students signing up for Advanced Placement computer science has flatlined.
Posted on: Fri, 20 Jun 2014 00:13:37 +0000
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