There were a lot of sewage spills last summer in Vermont.
Unfortunately, the state website that reported those spills was somewhat hard to navigate — people who wanted to know if their water was safe to drink had to manually refresh a website and then check to see if their municipality was listed.
That is, until Sara Simon’s sewage bot – lovingly referred to as the “poop bot” – was created.
Sara, the Web developer at Vermont Public Radio, is the person behind @DirtyWaterVT, a Twitter bot that tweets out sewage spills as they occur. It’s one of the many projects she’s cooked up while working at VPR, a station that serves a state where 30 percent of people don’t have access to broadband Internet.
Sara’s projects make it easier for people to find information without having to navigate multiple websites or figure out what to search for. She’s continually cooking up “public service bots” that connect people to services and information they need.
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