The Code for America network is made up of more than 27,000 people around the world who help make their communities and governments work better. Here’s a brief snapshot of what happened across the network this week:
Love letters for trees in Melbourne
Melbourne assigned trees email addresses so citizens could report problems. Instead, people wrote thousands of love letters to their favorite trees.
Introducing Code for Philly’s new leadership team
As the Code for America volunteer Brigades grow larger and start attracting lots of volunteers, we’ve seen their volunteer leaders increase in sophistication to match. Code for Philly just built out their team to better serve Philadelphia’s civic hacking community. Meet the new Code for Philly leadership team including Dawn McDougall, the group’s first executive director.
#Helpwanted: Angular and JavaScript at Code for Kansas City
Code for Kansas City is asking for some JavaScript help with the Projects Hub they are working on. Help them out.
PennApps, the largest hackathon in America, adds a civic tech category
PenApps is getting offering unique prizes for different routes, starting this fall. One of these new routes is for Social and Government Impact. PennApps offers free travel for college students across the world.
67 million more Federal Election Commission records at your fingertips
18F released the FEC Campaign Finance API. This is the first major update to the API, but the OpenFEC API is part of a larger project that will have continual improvements and additions. The records 18F allow you to see in detail where a campaign’s money comes from and where they spend their money.
Most profound compliment you can make of an #opendata API is to build something with it. Let’s get cracking folks. https://t.co/TGKTglprLj
— Mark Headd (@mheadd) July 9, 2015
Putting the public into public media membership
A study by 18F’s Melody Kramer includes nods to Code for America and Code for America Brigades. We helped set up a prototype of the Code for America’s Issue Finder to create a way for public radio stations to show any open source projects they have and how the public could help.
Past weekly updates can be found at #civictech or in slide form for your hacknights.