700+ People Would Like Your Help Snow Shoveling

Snowcrew.org

It’s the volunteer snow shoveling platform built on top of the global service request platform SeeClickFix. Over the last five years Snowcrew has navigated a tricky bureaucracy of neighbors and City Hall in an altruistic attempt to help others help their neighbors in snow events.

If you are in the North East and physically able, stop reading this, find a neighbor in need and grab your shovel. Start here: http://snowcrew.org/volunteer/

City Hall overwhelmingly wants Snowcrew. Neighbors need help shoveling, 700 and counting so far this storm(His name is Jonas). Many more have offered to help shovel over the years. But there is always concern for liability for the City as its pertains to a form of volunteerism that could leave neighbors in need exposed, and volunteers in danger of hurting themselves. In part this is why Snowcrew has been so successful and has grown every year. This is the kind of function that only a third party can provide effectively. And for us at SeeClickFix it is always a challenge for an organization that is not financially set-up to support Snowcrew as a separate platform. Through the hard work and extra hours of SeeClickFix employees, evangelist shoveler Joseph Porcelli and a whole lot of City Officials and neighbors Snowcrew seems to grow every year.

Today

This year we reverted Snowcrew’s functionality to the basic functionality of the SeeClickFix widget. For SeeClickFix this move reduces overhead in engineering, product and customer success and brings the platform back to the basics. So far it’s worked well for users and the early numbers indicate success.

Future

This dependency on our core platform will allow us to focus more on strengthening our API’s and architecture to let others create a stronger Snowcrew in the future. We are also continuing to improve the ways that our widgets are contextually dynamic so that anyone can spin up a volunteering widget in a flood, a snowstorm or for a park clean-up.