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Code for America Summit Recap

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This month, 52 brigades and over 110 brigade captains and core team members from all across the world got together in Oakland, California for the 2015 Code for America Summit. Open Austin was represented by Brigade Captain, Mateo Clarke, and Delivery Lead, Luqmaan Dawoodjee. In addition to our brigade, the City's Innovation Office sent 18 Austin City staff to participate in the conference.

Brigade Pre-Summit

At the brigade Pre-Summit, Mateo gave an Ignite talk on the Austin Park Equity project and our year long "Arc of Civic Hacking". The talk told the story of how a little bit of luck and deliberate year long planning can lead to successful hack projects. You can see the slides here. Luqmaan lead an unconference session and discussion on making projects easier to fork. Our brigade has been inspired by awesome projects in other cities but has found redeployment to be tricky. In response to this experience, we created a set of guidelines based on the unconference discussion: https://github.com/open-austin/sporkability.

Code for America Announcements

Code for America as an organization is now 6 years old, and as they look to mature and consolidate their quick growth, they spoke a lot about sustainability and focus.

At the Pre-Summit, CfA introduced project stages for brigade hack projects: Experiment, Alpha, Beta, and Official. Each of these stages is focused on getting user feedback:

  • Experiment — Listen to the community, research the problems, and conduct many experiments.
  • Alpha — Solve one person’s problem. Make project accessible for other contributors.
  • Beta — Get more users. Talk to users and get feedback. Write tests. Formalize a government, community or media partner for the project.
  • Official — Host a launch party. Talk to more users. Focus on user accessibility.

More information about these stages is available at http://www.codeforamerica.org/brigade/projects/stages.

Code for America also announced four key practice areas where they are hiring staff to grow subject matter expertise in each domain. Each of the Practice Area leads will help coordinate local brigade responses to global issues. These four domains are Health, Safety & Justice, Economic Development, and Communications & Engagement.

Common Themes

In talking to other brigades, we noticed a common challenge faced by all brigades: how to integrate beginner programmers. Brigades are stretched thin building and maintaining their civic tech projects. How do we help people who come to hack nights who want to learn how to code? Many cities already have a rich ecosystem of learn to code meetups. Do we direct beginners to the "learn to code" meetups? Do we adapt our hack nights to be more educational? We talked to brigade leaders from Philadelphia who started an Open Source Mentorship Program specifically for women. Ultimately, we know that there are ways to contribute as a "civic hacker" in ways that don’t involve coding and many brigades are thinking about how to integrate human centered design methods into their projects that leverage softer skills of all participants and can lead to more refined hack projects.

Videos

You can find videos of presentations from the Code for America Summit posted to Youtube.

https://www.codeforamerica.org/summit/

Some of our favorite tweets

 

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