2017: Our next challenge

When Open Austin was founded in 2009, Obama’s open data initiative was just getting started. A few years later in 2012, Code for America announced it would send its Fellows to inject tech talent into local government, including Austin as a pilot city. Five years ago, the White House recognized the first weekend in June as the National Day of Civic Hacking, an event we co-present annually as the ATX Hack for Change.

In the eight years since our founding, the world is a different place.

It is interesting to juxtapose the history of Open Austin, and the larger national “Civic Tech” movement, with the presidential timeline. It reminds us just how young this work is. In 2017, our organization is experiencing its first presidential transition.

Our 45th President, Donald J Trump, was inaugurated in DC last week. We’d like to reflect on highlights from 2016. Then we will lay out our focus ahead for 2017.

2016 Recap

Events

• We hosted or were invited to present at over 50 events including 17 Civic Hack Nights, 12 Civic Hack Saturdays, and 12 Open Gov & Civic Meetups.
• We co-presented the 4th annual ATX Hack for Change hosted at St. Edward’s University.
• We presented the 6th Code Across Austin at St. Ed’s.
• We hosted two seperate “Design for Civic Solutions” workshops in partnership with Austin Center for Design, Austin Design Week, and the City of Austin Office of Innovation.
• We listened to 16 Lightning Talks and read 24 blogs posts presented and written by members of our increasingly diverse community.
• We hosted a day long “Women Who Open Data” workshop co-presented with Women Who Code.
• We co-presented two Game Nights themed around Budget & Transportation with Glasshouse Policy & the Austin Monitor.
• We raised $7,220 from our generous friends at data.world, Ordoro, Cloudera, Google Fiber, Mozilla Hive, Dev Bootcamp, Blue Treble, USAA, Austin B-cyle, HubCiti, Vizias, and Code for America.

Advocacy

• We wrote a Letter of Support and participated as a civil society partner in the City’s ongoing OGP Subnational Government Pilot Program.
• Our members collaborated to create a 2016 Advocacy Agenda with input from community
• We provided pre-RFP recommendations to CoA Clerk office on Council Meetings Agenda Management System.
• We continued our tradition of creating a Council Candidate Survey and redesigned how the qualitative information is presented. Content from our 2016 City Council Candidate survey was included in ATA mobile app.

Projects

• Our community created 42 new project ideas.
• We updated our logo and launched a new website.
• Texas Appleseed gave us their Pro Bono Leadership Award at the Good Apple Dinner for our work on Texas School Discipline Lab helping to advocate for dismantling the school to prison pipeline.
• Our work in support of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, ACLU of Texas, and Texans for Accountable Government in creating atxbodycam.com was recognized on the main stage of the Code for America Summit.
• The Civic Hack Canvas was forked and used in DC, Japan, and used by the City of Austin in a Transportation Grant challenge.

2017

Since the Election of Donald J. Trump, we’ve seen an increased hunger from our community for projects and advocacy work that promotes the civic good. We believe the intersection of technology & government are vital for progress in our experiment in democracy.

As an all-volunteer organization, we labored to accomplish the achievements listed above. This year, we want to deepen our impact and try harder to support existing organizations in our community.

In order to do this, our coreteam has chosen three internal projects and we’d like your help with it.

Apply here to join our coreteam

1. Membership Development Plan
   • We want to make it easier for volunteers to assume roles within the organization, on projects, and in planning. We want to accommodate varying levels of availability.
   • We brainstormed about our org model and decided it looks most like a snowflake ❄️. We invite you to imagine where you could plug in.
2. Values
   • We know that if we want to fight hard battles in the next 4 years, we need to stand on a principled foundation.
   • At our meetup in November 2016, we facilitated a collaborative design exercise to find language that describes the core values of Civic Tech.
   • Then we distilled these insights into a better reflection of Why we do our work.
   • The tangible outcome will be an updated About Page (coming v soon).
3. Official Partner Projecets (aka: Open Austin Labs)
   • We want to get better and support projects that have:
   • Formal partnerships with external stakeholders (like other non-profits or the City of Austin)
   • Clear goals and deadlines
   • Opportunities for funding via grants, contracts, etc.
   • A plan for open-source maintenance and documentation.

But most importantly, we want to remain a friendly community where people come to learn, share, and collaborate with each other. We will need your help.

Please consider joining our snowflake ❄️❄️❄️

Apply here to join our coreteam

What does #democracy look like? A full room of folks learning about #opendata at @OpenAustin. Want to check it out? https://t.co/6EdbVcV0bO pic.twitter.com/bQ6z9hNVy9

— Daniel Ryne Lucio ⚡️ (@danielrynelucio) January 24, 2017

~ Mateo Clarke, Brigade Captain

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