Government Shutdown
When the US federal government shutdown in October 2013, we asked ourselves what we could do to help the furloughed federal employees. We looked around and found a Google Doc with a list of freelance gigs that was being shared online. Tom Clark had created it and had asked the folks at 1776 to pass it around. We reached out to 1776 to see if we might be able to work together.
Our Approach
We quickly created a site using Panopoly, a Drupal distribution. We used HybridAuth module for social login to let people login using their Google account. In less than five hours, we had built a site that turned the Google Doc into a mini jobs database where employees could advertise their capabilities and start-ups could list their needs. We put a link to the site on hacker news and went to sleep. The next morning, the server had crashed. We reached out to our friends at Acquia and the site was soon up and running on the Acquia cloud.
Within a couple of weeks, we learned that many people found positions and the site had gotten over 50,000 page views from over 16,000 unique visitors. It was featured on TechCrunch, Mashable, National Journal and many other news outlets.
We were truly humbled.