Adopt-a-Hydrant and Its Descendants
A tiny Rails app let Bostonians claim a hydrant to shovel out — and got re-skinned within months for Honolulu's tsunami sirens and, later, San Francisco's named storm drains. Small apps encoding one relationship remix best.
In 2011, Code for America fellow Erik Michaels-Ober built Adopt-a-Hydrant for Boston: a map of the city's fire hydrants where a resident could claim one and pledge to shovel it out after snowstorms. That's the whole app. It encoded exactly one civic relationship — *this piece of shared infrastructure is mine to care for* — and Code for America open-sourced it.
The remixes came fast. Honolulu's IT deputy director Forest Frizzell re-skinned it in 2012 as Adopt-a-Siren for tsunami sirens, with residents reporting failures during monthly tests. Chicago did sidewalks; multiple cities did storm drains. San Francisco's utility launched Adopt-a-Drain in 2016 with the crucial upgrade of *naming rights*: 25,000 drains with stewards and names like Drainy McDrainface and Drainmond Green — and the program nearly doubled in 2023, because whimsy is a retention mechanic, not decoration.
One honest caveat traveled with every remix: the code alone never spread it. Each city needed a champion — a fellow, an IT deputy, a utility program manager — proving again that the deployment is a relationship even when the app is twenty files.
What it teaches: the adopt-a-thing pattern is the most reliably remixable shape in civic tech, and it's block-sized by nature: tree wells, benches, little libraries, community fridges — anything that needs a person gets one, by name.
Details
- era: 2011–present
- place: Boston; Honolulu; San Francisco; Chicago
- repo url: https://github.com/codeforamerica/adopt-a-hydrant
- illustrates: remix-at-neighborhood-scale, six-lessons-neighborhood-tech
- source note: Lineage per Boston.gov, Honolulu's 2012 press materials, and KQED's Adopt-a-Drain coverage; repo is BSD-3-Clause (Code for America, 2011).
- practice kind: story
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Build prompt
Build: A Front-Porch Digest for One Block
A starter build: fork Front Porch Forum's constitution, not its code — real names, one geography, one email a day, a rotating…
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Build prompt
Build: A Living Asset Map
A starter build bridging both new shelves: an asset-based community development map where the assets are neighbors' own declared gifts,…
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Build prompt
Build: A Third-Places Map for Your Neighborhood
A starter build: a local Ushahidi — neighbors collectively map the porches, stoops, cafés, courts, and corners where the neighborhood…
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Build prompt
Build: Adopt-a-Thing for Your Block
A starter build: the Adopt-a-Hydrant pattern, remixed — a map of small civic objects (tree wells, storm drains, benches, little libraries)…
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Build prompt
Build: Participatory Budgeting for a Very Small Budget
A starter build: run real participatory budgeting on a block association's actual money — propose, develop, vote, do — sized so the whole…
Contributed by Erik Michaels-Ober (Code for America); Forest Frizzell (Honolulu); SFPUC Adopt-a-Drain · Boston → Honolulu → San Francisco · Boston.gov; Honolulu Civil Beat; KQED
Original source: https://www.boston.gov/public-safety/adopt-hydrant
See something to fix or add? Suggest an edit on GitHub — the commons lives in git too, and its history is the changelog.
local-civic-techcivic-tech-storystewardshipremixopen-source