SnapFresh.org Recently won the Applications For Good San Francisco Competition
So I recently went to a regional hackathon which was a regional try-out for a national competition called Applications for Good the first weekend I moved back to San Francisco.
I was feeling like being creative, and thought what better way to be creative than apply my skills in a way that might help people.
That morning, Jeremy Canfield, Aaron Bannert, Michelle Koeth and I were all sitting at a table when Jeremy and I discovered we were both interested in the same topic: writing an sms based application that could help people find foodstamps. Aaron and I had been chatting earlier, so we happened to be sitting next to each other. And we formed a team. Michelle was there also, and she joined too, sealing off the four-person team. Well anyways, one thing led to another, and we won first place in the competition.
You can see the app we created at http://www.snapfresh.org
The code is open source, and available at http://github.com/ysiadf/allincomefoods
A post about the day is available at: http://applicationsforgood.org/blog/sf-comes-together-to-build-applications-for-good/
And Michelle blogged about it also in better depth than I have, at the codeforamerica blog on: http://codeforamerica.org/2011/05/13/code-for-america-fellows-part-of-winning-team-at-applications-for-good-sf/
Now we are competing in the national competition: http://applicationsforgood.org/solutions/snapfresh-food-finder/
Whether we win the national competition or not, the app is starting to gather momentum with the City of San Francisco contributing a server, and One Economy contributing an sms shortcode and free sms messages for us to start scaling out the app. Pretty exciting stuff! Let’s see where it goes.