Crowdsourcing through the snow, on a one-server open source website?

"Jingle Bells" it is not, but rather Snowmageddon - The Clean-Up. The site's creators hope to tap the power of the crowd to help Washington, D.C., dig itself out from under the blizzard that still blankets that city and others on the East Coast with snow. Apparently, the deluge has challenged some of the official response teams.

"No offense to the hard-working government workers doing their best to help clean up the city, but I was tired of seeing my streets clogged with snow, and neighbors stuck inside," said Ryan Ozimek. "So, I thought I'd start a little website yesterday afternoon to help connect people having snowmageddon problems – say, a stuck car – with people that have snowmageddon solutions, like strong arms and a shovel."

Ozimek, the founder and CEO of open source web-development firm Picnet, and a friend who works for him assembled the Snowmageddon site using Ushahidi. It's a PHP/MySQL application that plots location, time and descriptive metadata on a map, in this case to describe snow problems and snow solutions.

Ushahidi means "testimony" in Swahili, according to the project's blog. It was developed to document post-election violence in Kenya in 2008, and now forms the backbone of Haiti's "4636" emergency short-messaging emergency system.

The application appears equally suited to today's East Coast snow-mergencies because its basic elements – location, time and description of a problem – apply there too. Ozimek says he and his friend launched the site a mere two hours after the idea initially occurred to them.

The site hasn't really taken off yet, but that could change as more people catch wind of the service. If it really was conceived and built in less than the time it takes to shovel five driveways, as Ozimek claims, that's impressive enough, for now.

The next time a blizzard strikes? "Snow problem." (Well, less of one, anyway.)

__Update 3:24 ET: __Pittsburgh follows suit with CityZenMobile, which maps residents' Twitter reports of road conditions and snow removal progress via @howsmystreet.

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Photo used with permission of Samer Farha