Dear Community,
The past couple of months have been a challenging time for our team. Our team members have faced personal challenges, as we all do, which brought us out of the groove. However, we are excited to share what we have accomplished!
We started the build out of the platform. We have also created our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/DrainDefendersLFT/). Please like it and fill out the survey (https://forms.gle/7UeishEK5jaF2K2h7) regarding where our pilot program should be. We want to make sure we are prioritizing locations the community is invested in supporting. We are proud of this being an open community project. We look forward to including everyone who wishes to be involved on this project.
We have estimated out technical needs, and look forward to inviting your support to help us program, if that’s your cup of tea! We are anticipating about 160 hours of development work. We will also need front-end development in CSS, HTML, and React. For those who don’t code in the above languages, we also need help with creating educational materials around storm drain maintenance. If you want to support our educational and marketing efforts (creating material, boots-on-the-ground efforts, or marketing supporting) please email draindefendersLFT@gmail.com with your interests.
Our current, most pressing challenge is that we are working with LCG to get access to the storm drain data set. We are reaching out to our city and parish council members to gain support for this process, as well as leveraging this project’s champions to continue requesting access to the data. If you want to help, you can contact your council members (find their contact info here: http://bit.ly/lft-council) and let them know you support giving our team access to the storm drain location dataset and would love to see more open data projects, like this one, develop across Lafayette!
As always, we want to emphasize that our core value is transparency. Follow our Trello board (https://trello.com/b/MnlSujIZ/adopt-a-storm-drain-timeline) to see our progress. This is our way of living our truth and being the change we want to see in the world. We hope you follow our progress along the way, or better yet, participate however you want to.
Now, let’s get to work. We have a lot of #DrainDefenders to mobilize and even more #StormDrains that need adopting!
Sincerely,
The Adopt a Storm Drain Team