Show Up Houston

Inspiration

The brief asked for a map of 311 dumping hotspots where volunteers could claim a spot and upload a photo when they were done. Before building it, I talked with the City's Director of Innovation. During the World Cup, community groups wanted to run cleanups and couldn't, because the systems were disconnected and there was no process to follow.

So I looked at what a church or civic club has to do to run one cleanup in Houston. They deal with four systems, each run by someone different:

Keep Houston Beautiful's (KHB) Google Form to get the event promoted
Houston ToolBank's member portal for tools
a PDF emailed to Solid Waste at least 21 days ahead for a roll-off dumpster
Volunteer Houston, or one of a dozen other sign-up tools, for volunteers

None of them tells you who owns the land, whether another group cleaned it last week, or where help is needed most. A hotspot map wouldn't fix any of that.

What it does

Show Up Houston is a shared calendar and map of volunteer cleanups, meant to be run by KHB and the City. An organizer posts once, and the same event page carries the requests, sign-ups, check-in and report. Public pages are in English, Spanish and Vietnamese, and volunteers don't need an account.

Whose land is this? The app checks every pin live against 1.55M county parcels, TxDOT roads and the City limits. The organizer gets one line back, like "City street, you're good to go" or "Flood Control District land, this needs an agreement that takes 60 to 90 days." It never shows a private owner's name.
Requests with the deadline up front. Supplies and roll-offs are one step of the event form, and each shows the last day you can still ask. Solid Waste gets a filled-in form instead of an emailed PDF.
Suggested areas from 311. 311 data stays with staff. Many dumping cases sit on private land or need a City truck, and a resident can't do much with a case pin. So staff turn litter clusters into suggested areas, and organizers who drop a pin nearby get pointed to them. If another group is cleaning the same ground within 30 days, both get a warning, but neither is blocked.
The report. The organizer files it on a phone at the bag pile in about two minutes. It marks the area cleaned, adds to citywide totals, and makes a share image and service-hours letters. Minnesota's drain program, the largest in the country, hears back from only about 40% of participants, so here a late report holds the group's next supply request. Once Houston has volunteer bag pickup, the report will request it, the way it does in Seattle and Oakland.
Staff queues. KHB, Solid Waste, Parks and 311 analysts each see only their own work. So events go live right away, and only a new group's first event or anything the automatic screen flags waits for approval. Everything else goes on a daily list for KHB to skim.

Lessons from other cities

The closest model is Seattle's Green Seattle Partnership, which runs on a system called CEDAR that 11+ cities share. Organizers create an event, the program manager approves it, tools get requested weeks ahead, and a worklog closes it out. I copied that shape, along with Oakland's 12-month waiver and Keep Austin Beautiful's required reports.
I also learned from what went wrong. Houston's Adopt-A-Drain is a dense GIS map of every storm drain in the city, and picking one to adopt from it is painful. Oakland's public data layer returned volunteer names, emails and phone numbers to anyone who asked, and one of its report forms accepted 80,880 hours from 2,747 people in a year.
Austin paid GivePulse $24,000 in 2020. This should run for about $1,000 to $1,500 a year.

Users and roles

To try it, use the role switcher to move between volunteer, organizer, KHB and City staff, and the demo clock to skip ahead to event day.

What's next

Every volunteer-run adopt-a app I traced is dead or was replaced. Adopt-a-Hydrant hasn't had a commit since 2016.

Polish up the app with a proper backend.
The City names an owner, with the Office of Innovation as sponsor and HITS, the City's IT department, as host.
KHB runs it day to day.
KHB Day 2027 is the pilot, with 5 to 10 of the repeat organizers already in KHB's feed.
Rebuild Adopt-A-Drain (which doesn't seem to be updated in a while) onto the same platform.
Adoptions and a catalog of pre-approved street trees and benches are designed but not built yet, and the catalog needs policy changes first.