The day after Baltimore residents broke out into protests following the funeral of Freddie Gray, schools were closed, leaving 84,000 kids without classes — and many without a lunch.
So the #BaltimoreLunch hashtag spread like wildfire.
The tweets indicating where free lunches were being distributed throughout Baltimore caught the eye of a D.C. developer.
Rodney Cobb decided to put some harmony in the chaos of information. “I just couldn’t sit back and be like were not going to do nothing,” he said. “I just didn’t think that that was right.”
Even though schools were closed only Tuesday, Cobb added, supermarket closures could result in children going hungry for several more days. About 84 percent of Baltimore’s public school students are on free or reduced lunch.
Cobb tweeted a call to arms to fellow civic technologists. “I got the back end, somebody can do the front-end stuff,” said Cobb, the cofounder of GovReady, a government IT and cybersecurity compliance company.
All #dataviz #GIS #devs lets put together a interactive map of food spots for kids in Bmore today I can set up the server #BaltimoreLunch
— Rodney Cobb (@facetherathe) April 28, 2015
Cobb, who is a member of Code for DC, soon received a response from local brigade co-captain Matt Bailey.
The coders quickly spit out a website that mapped free lunches based on information collected from social media.
go to http://t.co/CymSTMwQ2S for more locations https://t.co/CI4O01wMEO
— Rodney Cobb (@facetherathe) April 28, 2015
Cobb and Code for DC are now considering porting over BaltimoreLunch.org content to Finda, a Code for Boston app for mapping datasets.
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