OSCON 2019 – Portland, OR

About this course

exactly five years ago today I stumbled upon something that was just crazy like terrible jarring one of the most awful things I've ever seen in my life I

couldn't believe it like most of you I was preparing for a day of code and conference calls what really actually two fundamentally incompatible things but bear with me

what I stumbled upon that morning was this the idea that a hundred thousand people in Detroit we're about to have to live without running water because they couldn't afford their water bills and if

you have the misfortune of living in a city like Detroit or Baltimore or Philadelphia or many other cities in the United States if you're too poor to pay your water bill they will shut you off

they don't care if you are elderly suffering from Alzheimer's they don't care if you've been laid off from your job of 20 years they don't even care if you're fighting for your life against

breast cancer if you haven't paid your water bill they will shut you off so what that basically says is that in a country where life liberty and the pursuit of happiness is

written into the Constitution the thing that you need for life is not a right for you and of course at the time I was working in City Hall in Atlanta and I thought that was crazy

and I was really angry about it and I didn't just let this die as a story as a tab in my browser where I just read it and I just go oh that's too bad and do nothing about it so what happened

was that my co-founder and I that same day ended up building a website that turned into the human utility where we connect people who need help with their water bills to people who want to give

and in the first 30 days of doing that we paid $100,000 in water bills for people people who had lost their jobs single parents grandparents folks of that sort and so what I'm here to do

today is kind of like bring the story to you all to hopefully inspire someone here to try to do the same thing with technology with software because we have so much at our disposal but I don't

think we're maximizing the potential things I think we really should so the first thing that I would say if you want to do something like this and use software to inspire better living for

people is to start small even though this problem affects over 40 million people in the United States we didn't let that stop us because we first of all we didn't know so all we did was we

threw up a really basic website this is our first website five years ago and all it did was connect people who needed help with their water bills to folks that didn't who folks who couldn't

couldn't pay their bills and along those lines we ended up finding out that like people get shut off for the craziest reasons like they have health problems and whatnot but what ended up happening

is that we connected all these people with with help for their water bills five years later this is what it looks like but again you don't have to start fancy which you can do is just throw up

a really ugly website and go from there and if you're doing something that's meaningful people will go along with you you