The past several days my mind has been spinning with ways to breathe life back into my abandoned Raspberry Pi robot, Ponder. Its been sitting dormant since mid 2015; my increasingly busy life at the time and a number of hardware issues caused me to lose momentum on the project.
Ponder was built from a random rush of inspiration and a desire to teach myself some basics about working with hardware. …
One day in the summer of 2014 I was out for a run when a rush of sudden technology inspiration came over me. I wanted to build a rover that could automatically drive itself around the floor like a Roomba, take pictures, and tell me what the temperature was in which ever corner of a room it stumbled into.
Why? Because. Oh, “why” about that last part? Again, because.
Now, we don’t just come into the world naturally knowing how to purchase little wires and solder them together, so I went on a learning binge that lasted several weeks. I…
We’re excited to announce that Charlotte has been selected as a fellowship city as part of Code for America’s 2019 Community Fellowship Program! The community fellowship, an annual program founded in 2018, empowers cities to develop solutions to complex problems by partnering citizens, referred to as “fellows,” with local government agencies.
Charlotte was one of seven cities selected from a pool of thirty applicants and will be working with two part-time fellows from Open Charlotte Brigade; Jeffery Carmichael as well as Open Charlotte Brigade’s captain, Jill Bjers. The two fellows will be working in the field of criminal justice and…
We’re just a few hours away from the main stage presentations at this year’s Code for America Summit and we’re looking forward to sharing the experience with you!
Each year the annual Code for America Summit kicks off the next twelve months of civic tech action in the Code for America Brigade Network with inspiring keynotes, skill-building workshops, and a place for government workers and brigade volunteers to create working relationships with one another.
It’s also a great time for us, the volunteers at Open Charlotte Brigade, to focus on our goals full time for a few days and collaborate…
Community night is a new monthly event at Open Charlotte Brigade where we put the spotlight on our community partners then hold an open planning session to address future moves by our organization. In following our belief that public resources should be open and accessible to all residents, we created community night as a place for residents to connect with one another, learn about their city, and participate in our mission to create a more open and accessible Charlotte.
At Wednesday evening’s meeting, we welcomed our first community night presenter, Keri Shearer from the City of Charlotte’s innovation and technology…
Today, Code for America brigades around the nation are observing International Open Data Day. Traditionally Open Charlotte Brigade uses this day for a big event focused on educating residents about open data and how it can be used to solve challenges in their community. While that may not be the case this year, open data remains at the core of what we do.
We believe public resources including data should be open, accessible, and friendly to all residents. That means not only should residents have access to public records, but those records should also be available in a way that’s…
At Open Charlotte Brigade we’re focused on making government services better and more accessible. We’ve held community forums to gather feedback and discuss areas the city can provide better services, we’ve built and launched projects that let residents subscribe to their city and check their EBT card balance, and now we want to know how you would imagine government services from the ground up through technology.
Imagine you’re in charge of establishing a digital footprint in an up and coming town with a brand new technology department. Which services would you take online first and how should your team shape…
Normally this is the time period we refer to as “wrapping up the year,” but as much as we’re looking forward to our annual break we’re excited and looking forward to next year!
2018 has been a big year for us; we rebranded to Open Charlotte Brigade, had our largest ever presence at Code for America Summit, held Code for America Brigade Congress in our city, we’ve had several projects in development, we welcomed hundreds of new volunteers that participated in our Community Action Nights, and we haven’t even made it to the annual Open NC Summit!
Each October leaders and members of individual Code for America brigades come together for an in-person meeting we call “Brigade Congress.” This is a weekend-long conference that enables us to share what each team has been doing and work together to improve our processes and go home to make bigger impacts in our communities.
A common theme that has come up in the two Brigade Congress’ I’ve attended is the desire for brigades to collaborate more while away from each other. …
As I juggle maintaining several projects at and outside of work then have to balance moving my personal life forward as well I find myself overwhelmed trying to make sense of everything I have to do at times. Weekends arrive and I forget which store I told myself earlier in the week I needed to visit, and great ideas that in random moments of inspiration go either unlogged or buried in a virtual notebook to be uncovered beyond their window of usefulness.
I love blocking off time on my digital calendar to work on tasks and I use handwritten notes…
Andrew Natoli
Software developer, citizen technologist, musician, cyclist, runner, and petter of animals.
