Code for All Dispatch — March 2020 Edition

Our monthly newsletter is one of the ways we keep up with each other by sharing updates, resources, and opportunities.

Young folks at Open Data Kosovo’s “Techstitution 3.0” training course, which aims to equip Kosovo youth with the necessary ICT skills and capabilities for a prosperous future as a programmer.

👋 Welcome

This last (and quick) month has been filled with a lot of learning for us. We’ve been busy conducting member interviews to find out as much as we can about all of our member organizations and the process has been incredibly enlightening for our core team! We’ve also (finally!) finished up our 2019 Year in Review and had our first CoP session. Read on for details on each, as well as updates from 11 of our member organizations from around the globe.

❗️Update on our upcoming Summit: We are currently drafting a contingency plan due to the potential impact of the coronavirus outbreak and will publish more details if the need arises.

👪 Code for All Updates

• Our 2019 Year in Review is complete! Check out the recap here.
• Sofía and Kelly will be hosting a Code for All side event at TicTec, where they’ll share information about the network and our new programs. We’re working on finding a venue and we’ll be sending out updates as soon as we know more, but you can register here.
• We’ve just about finished with all of our member interviews — thank you so much to those who have taken the time to speak with us to share your stories, opinions and ideas. We’ll be sharing what we’ve learned from these interviews in our upcoming Board Meeting, as well as at Summit, and will be using the feedback we’ve received to help shape our strategy going forward!
• We had our first Communities of Practice (CoP) session this past month, where we introduced the program and received some feedback. Among other things, we learned that folks are interested in having a way to keep track of other organization’s projects without needing to be available at a particular time (like, say, during a scheduled webinar), and that the terms we’ve been using like ‘Digital Citizen Engagement’ and ‘Good Governance’ might not be the easiest to understand straight away. We’ll be using this feedback to improve and prepare for what will come next in the program! If you missed the last session, you can catch up here, and be sure to contact Sofía (sofia@codeforall.org / @sofia) if you have any questions.
• Also, we’re organizing an episode of Civic Tech Chat to showcase the Tech for Non Tech (T4NT) handover. The episode will feature Lina Patel, representing Code for Australia, and Nao Myoshu, representing Code for Japan. Watch for the podcast here in the upcoming weeks and let us know your thoughts on Slack after taking a listen!

📰 Member Updates

• Ciudadanía Inteligente 🌎 recently released Abre Alcaldías to open and bring local governments from México, Ecuador, El Salvador and Guatemala close to the citizenry. Additionally, we joined FIBGAR and PODER to launch LatamLeaks, the first initiative in LA that promotes anonymous reports of fraud and corrupt techniques within both public and private sectors. In February, we also organized Ciudadanía Conectada techfest, where we approached emerging issues (such as misinformation in the digital era, online gender violence and biases in the use of Artificial Intelligence) to the citizens of Quilicura.
• Civic Tech Sweden 🇸🇪 started 2020 with its biggest event to date, a discussion on open data with presentations from Mélanie Robert from Canada’s OpenGov team and several Swedish officials. You can watch the replay here (Mélanie’s presentation in English, the rest in Swedish). We also recently released the first episode of our podcast on civic tech (in Swedish as well). We are now focusing on organising an event in Stockholm for Open Data Day.
• Code for Africa 🌍 and the pan-African drone network, africanDRONE, supported the African Drone Forum in Kigali, Rwanda in February. It brought together regulators, manufacturers and development organisations to discuss policy harmonisation across the continent and use cases. Watch the highlights video here. Also, read more here about how we’ve worked alongside a number of human rights organizations to use data and civic tech to spotlight police killings in Kenya.
• Code for America 🇺🇸 is celebrating 10 years at the Code for America Summit March 11–13. Learn about our new program focused on the Earned Income Tax Credit, and about how we used text message reminders to get up to 79% more people to show up prepared for safety net appointments in Louisiana. Clear my Record helps dismiss 66,000 convictions in Los Angeles County, and we launched a paper about how government can better implement policy.
• Code for Australia 🇦🇺 have bid farewell to Grace O’Hara and welcomed Esther Semo, our new Head of Community & Communications. Our recycling Fellowship with Hobsons Bay Council have shared a blog post on their journey so far and we’ve just started our second fellowship of 2020, designing a triage tool with Legal Aid NSW. We’ve also shared our submission on the Victorian Government’s new Open Data policy.
• Code for Canada 🇨🇦 is hosting their first-ever Summit in March. Not able to make it? We’ve got your back. You can view live notes from the sessions here, read interviews with speakers on our blog, and videos from all the sessions will be made available after the Summit on our YouTube channel!
• Code for Japan 🇯🇵 is running a series of workshops named DX academy to teach folks how to change government workflows in a digital way. 30 government officials from 10 local governments declared their goal, analyzed their workflow, learned how they can improve their services by creating paper prototypes, and even made KPIs for measuring improvements.
• Code for Pakistan 🇵🇰 is getting ready to launch the sixth cycle of the KP Government Innovation Fellowship Program in March. Applications are open till Feb 29 http://bit.ly/kpfellowship20!
• Code for Romania 🇹🇩 ended the first year of research for the Civic Labs program that resulted in identifying blockages at the society level and more than 70 prototyped technological solutions to address. All solutions are available for free and designed to be adopted by NGOs. Also, Bogdan, co-founder and CEO, was invited to attend “Mobilising and Inspiring Action with Technology” by World Economic Forum in Katmandu where he was part of a working group that tackled “Transparency and Open Data”.
• mySociety 🇬🇧 has just started a new FOI project funded by NESTA — we’re at the beginning now so we can’t say much but we’re excited to develop some new features for our AlaveteliPro services! Watch our blog for an example of how Friends of the Earth are using our MapIt API to help figure out how climate friendly different councils in the UK are.
• Open Data Kosovo 🇽🇰 has held a one week training course, teaching 15 young women skills for becoming future programmers. Out of the 15 women, 3 will be interning at Open Data Kosovo to increase youth employment and prepare them for the workplace. Also, preparations for the third edition of GOT_Data have started. Stay tuned for more at https://got-data.org!

💻 Job Opportunities

This is where we share current job opportunities we’ve found within the network.

• Code for America Senior Software Engineer | Staff/Principal Security Engineer | Service Designer | (All Openings)
• Code for Africa Researchers/Writers | Copy Editors | Front End Software Engineer | Python Software Engineer

🌍 Events around the world

This is where we share upcoming events within the civic tech world.

• [March 6] Open Belgium Hasselt (BE)
• [March 7] Open Data Day Global
• [March 8] International Women’s Day Global
• [March 10–11] Code for Canada Summit Toronto (CA)
• [March 11–13] Code for America Summit Washington, D.C. (US)
• [March 24–25] mySociety TICTeC Reykjavik (IS)
• [April 22] Earth Challenge Global
• [April 22] Code for All Summit Gdańsk (PL)
• [April 23–25] Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) Gdańsk (PL)
• [May 24–26] European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) Conference Trieste (IT)
• [Dec 5–6] GOT_DATA Pristina (XK)

🐰 That’s all folks!

To get in touch with Code for All, hit reply to this email or find us on Slack (@kelly she, @sofia, @lorin).

Also, if you know anyone else who might want to subscribe to our community newsletter, they can sign up to receive updates here.

Until next month — keep up the good work!

Team Code for All

(Kelly, Sofía & Lorin)