Inspiration

Code for America participants made adopt-a-fire-hydrant to take some of the burden off of government employees during a blizzard. The response from communities was overwhelming and people volunteered to clear thousands of fire hydrants. We wanted to take the adopt-a-thing concept to the next level.

What it does

Adopt a thing allows people to report what things in their areas are problematic and need to be addressed. It also allows people to find projects, places, and public resources to take responsibility for and learn when there's a problem. It also allows users (which could include the government) to see whether government action was necessarily to alleviate a given problem. In order to help people connect with their representatives when taking things into their own hands is too much adopt-a-thing provides a links to the users' state and local representatives.

How I built it

Node.js, and jade

Challenges I ran into

Using APIs properly, deploying the app online

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Getting the site to run on a .co site (surprisingly difficult), getting federal and state representatives to be displayed in tandem, navigating a bunch of APIs and weathering the difficult mental context switch to jade

What I learned

More uses of node and jade templating (which I had never done before)

What's next for Adoptathing

Making performance more reliable

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