Ruby Coders

Pop Up Burlington

Website/App store links:

http://pop-up-burlington.herokuapp.com/

http://www.slideshare.net/amekay/pop-up-burlington-rhok-june-2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kt2-Jq99ww&feature=youtu.be

Summary:

Pop Up Burlington is matchmaking great ideas for making our community better and great spaces that aren't being used to their full potential. Art and music events, community meals, hackathons, social entrepreneurs testing out new ideas for potential businesses...who knows what will pop up? All Pop Up projects come from the community and from the heart. For now, we're playing matchmaker: all submissions will be thoughtfully reviewed and several matches made to unlock great events for everyone to enjoy. Later this summer, you'll be able to start using the Pop Up Burlington site to make your own matches.

Pop Up Burlington is itself a Pop Up: a group of people had a great idea for something they thought would make the community better. Thanks to the Random Hacks of Kindness event sponsored by Small Dog Electronics, and the mad coding skills of Adam Bouchard (Agilion Apps) and Micah Mutrux, supported by Amy Kirschner (VBSR Marketplace), Kyra Kristof (Pollin8r) and Will Szal, we now have a working web app. Amazing community partners include: Burlington Community Economic Development Office, Old North End Arts and Business Network, and &.

Why we are working on this problem:

How many amazing ideas are never realized because of a lack of appropriate space? How many commercial spaces are vacant or underutilized?

What we accomplished during the event:

During this event we:

designed and developed a working web app that supports the submission of ideas and space information from community members, and matching by system admins
created a short promotional video
facilitated a match for an upcoming Pop Up event: Co-Working Shipping Lane to be held at Agilion Apps' office space

Traction:

We have secured local partnerships with Burlington Community Economic Development Office and the Old North End Arts and Business Network, and have already received a request to share the Pop Up methodology and web app code for use in San Francisco.

Next steps:

For (approx.) the next twelve weeks, we will prototype Pop Up Burlington. The web app developed during this event will be released as an alpha and used to facilitate the collection of local ideas and available spaces. This initial release asks users to respond to a handful of questions in a long text format. We are using this approach to surface the interests and descriptive language naturally employed by users, and will use this information to build the taxonomy for more specific data collection forms. Using a curated approach, we will manage the selective matching of ideas to spaces in order to further refine our methodology. Later this summer, another iteration of the Pop Up Burlington site will be released that supports users to make their own matches.

Community help:

Burlington locals interested in gift economics.

Code Repository:

https://github.com/rhokburlington/pop-up-burlington

Category:

Application

Status:

Operational

Programming languages:

html5

ruby

CSS3