Across America, the challenges facing city governments are growing ever more complex, while city budgets are tightening. At the same time, the internet has made it cheaper and easier for elected officials to communicate with their constituents. This made us think: What if cities started using the internet to organize citizen volunteers? If executed properly, we believed this could relieve some of the pressure on government while building stronger local communities.

Code for America put this theory to the test in the city of Boston with Adopt a Hydrant, a simple web application that allows Bostonians to “adopt” fire hydrants near their homes or offices. (An overview video with a demo is embedded below.)

During the winter, storms often hide fire hydrants under piles of snow making them impossible to find quickly. Once they are found, fire fighters must spend precious minutes shoveling out hydrants before they can starting putting out the fire. With thousands of fire hydrants, most cities simply doesn’t have the resources to shovel them all out.

So, what’s a city to do? In a word: crowdsource.

If one or two people on each block pledged to shovel out a fire hydrant after it snows, the problem would be solved. The Adopt a Hydrant application was designed to coordinate that effort, to ensure that every hydrant in the city has a “parent” to care for it.

Much like the fire hydrants it aims to protect, the Adopt a Hydrant software is free for any city to adopt. Just add data.

To deploy Adopt a Hydrant, all you need is the precise coordinates—latitude and longitude—of every fire hydrant in your city. For the city of Boston, this data was already available on their GIS Data Hub. Your city may already offer a similar resource.

But what if hydrant data isn’t available in your city? That got us thinking: What other data sets could we plug into Adopt a Hydrant? What if Adopt a Hydrant wasn’t just for fire hydrants? What if citizens could adopt a tree, a park, or a playground? People should be empowered to make a commitment to tend and nurture any bit of civic infrastructure.

As a result, we’ve completely rearchitected the Adopt a Hydrant software so that it’s not at all specific to fire hydrants. In fact, the word “hydrant” appears in just one place the codebase. Change that occurrence to “park”, add data, and—BOOM—you’ve just created a new Adopt a Park initiative for your city.

We believe this this framework can be a powerful tool for engaging citizens or civic groups (Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, etc.) to take responsibility for the wellbeing of their communities.

We’d love to hear what you’re doing with this software. It’s available to download or free from GitHub. Tell us the story of how you’re using it to increase civic participation in your city.