Code for All Newsletter — April 2020 — Response to COVID-19
Our monthly newsletter is one of the ways we keep up with each other by sharing updates, resources, and opportunities.
Published in
6 min readApr 10, 2020
👋 Welcome
Hello civic tech friends and welcome to our April update. Before we dive into what’s new, we’d like to acknowledge the current struggle that everyone is facing around the world and would like to say that we hope you and your loved ones are safe and well. The COVID-19 crisis has shown us an entirely new world, and we still don’t know just how detrimental the repercussions will be for everyone in the short and long term. One thing we have seen so far, though, is an incredible response from the global civic tech community. We’ve started to capture different projects popping up within the Network (and beyond) and you can view them on this open document and in this article. Read on to catch up with what we’ve been up to and what will be coming up soon.
⏰ Sixty Minute Sprint
- [5 minutes] We have our next Peer Learning Session coming up, which will feature the incredible Lina Patel and Melina Chan as our hosts. The topic discussed will be Best Practices for Facilitating Online Meetings & Events and the sessions will be next week, on April 15th at 22:00 GMT and April 16th at 07:00 GMT. Calendar invites have been sent out, please feel free to add anyone else who might be interested to the invite, or share this link with them. Reach out the Lorin (lorin@codeforall.org) if you have any questions!
- [5 minutes] Please add or update your COVID-19 projects onto our open document. This is where we’ve been keeping track of all the different projects that have been popping up within the Network to combat the pandemic.
- [10 minutes] If you haven’t already, please add your organization’s COVID-19 related projects to the crowdsourced Coronavirus Tech Handbook.
📝 Code for All Updates
- On March 19th, we began hosting weekly group discussions around COVID-19 with folks from the community. So far we’ve hosted 4 sessions (2 sessions per week to accommodate time zones). You can find notes and video recordings here from previous sessions. We have a calendar invite sent out for upcoming meetings, please let us know if you haven’t received an invite but would like to (reach out to Sofía at sofia@codeforall.org). We’ll continue these meetings as long as they are providing use to folks within the Network.
- We’re currently working out a plan to provide an online alternative for our Summit. We’ll send out updates as soon as we have a clearer picture. If you have any ideas for what you’d like to see or discuss, please let us know! (Reach out to Kelly at kelly@codeforall.org or @kelly she on Slack.)
- We’re also looking into possible exchanges centered on COVID-19 projects, where two or more organizations from the Network would have the opportunity to work together on a project with funding provided (yay for funding!). We’ve started a spreadsheet where we’ll be organizing COVID-19 projects by category and looking for overlap between projects and organizations.
📰 Member Updates
📌For more updates relating to projects in response to COVID-19, check out Civic Tech takes on a pandemic.
- Ciudadanía Inteligente 🌎believes that the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be an excuse for governments to rule behind closed doors. They believe that the best way to make decisions during a crisis is through transparency and citizen participation. With this in mind, they’ve launched Abre Alcaldías, which is a project that seeks to train and engage local governments around participatory, open and innovative management. Folks who work for local governments in Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador or Guatemala can apply to our program free of charge and get the tools and methodologies to look for social solutions and create public policies with the community. We are taking off on April 13th! Apply now and be part of our virtual school.
- Code for Africa 🌍offices have all switched to 100% remote work as of March 13th as part of the #flattenthecurve Covid-19 operation. We’ve partnered with AfricArXiv to help surface actionable local data and credible local scientific research. PesaCheck, our East Africa fact-checking unit, has had its Covid-19 misinfo claims added to the IFCN’s database, which has been made public. Our sensors.AFRICA project has partnered with the World Bank Kenya to include sensors in the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics’ household surveys to measure indoor air pollution. It’s the first time an African government statistics organization is measuring air quality at this level.
- Code for Australia 🇦🇺has a lot in the making! Our Legal Aid New South Wales Fellows started, and they’ve been tasked with designing a triage tool to help empower people in need of legal assistance. Also, In response to COVID-19 we’ve come up with a register of local civic tech initiatives (there’s a tab for international projects so please feel free to add yours in! ). We’ve also come up with a guide to assist our friends in Government to work remotely. We’re also looking on the bright side with this blog post about the benefits of this rapid rate of change. Finally, we’re spending a lot of time updating policies which we hope we’ll soon be able to share with the broader Code for All Network for feedback and collaboration.
- Code for Germany 🇩🇪 has worked with six other organizations and under the patronage of the Federal Government to organize a hackathon under the motto “WeVsVirus” with 30,000 people actively participating as mentors, idea providers or working on projects. The more than 1,000 final projects were evaluated by a jury. For the best 20 projects, there are several funding and support programs in place to bring these prototypes into practice and to help people in need. People working on COVID-19 projects outside of the hackathon are also welcome to apply for funding. You can find more info here. In other news, we’re continuing to work on “Code for Climate”, everything concerning ecological sustainability, protection of nature and how we can support public perception about critical climate issues. We seek to connect with activists from the environmental NGO scene and to support the global call towards realization of the Paris Agreement on a municipal level.
- Code for Japan 🇯🇵 has developed the official site for Tokyo Metropolitan’s novel coronavirus countermeasures. The source code of the site, which displays the latest information and trends of infections in Tokyo Metropolitan areas, has been made available as open source and local civic-hackers developed their local versions.
- Code for Pakistan 🇵🇰 has been collaborating with the Government of Pakistan’s Digital Pakistan team to develop a data dashboard to track the spread of COVID-19. Also, the sixth cycle of the KP Government Innovation Fellowship Program was scheduled to kick off on April 1, and we received 3,000+ applications for 20 positions. However, due to the current COVID-19 pandemic and WHO guidelines for social distancing, we have had to put the current Fellowship cycle on hold. We are now exploring the possibility of running the Fellowship Program virtually and remotely. We hope to focus the Virtual Fellowship this year on assisting Govt. Departments with addressing the short-term and long-term effects of the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns.
- Code for Romania 🇹🇩 has put its usual activity on hold for the duration of the crisis and has established the Code For Romania Task Force, a rapid-response civic tech group entirely dedicated to helping the Romanian Government and citizens cope with the crisis. The COVID-19 app ecosystem consists of six tools, three of which have already been launched, to help mitigate some of the effects of the crisis, provide clear, verified data to citizens and relief to the authorities. All of these solutions are developed by an all-volunteer UX and development team and are in partnership with the Romanian Government -> https://code4.ro/en/apps/
- Open Data Kosovo 🇽🇰 has tried their best to give as much as they can to the community during this unfortunate time considering the COVID-19 Outbreak. We’ve opened online courses for everyone interested from the kursori.org platform, an open online platform designed and developed by ODK. Furthermore, ODK has created a one-page website updating real-time data and statistics regarding Covid-19 in Kosovo and abroad: https://opendatakosovo.org/covid-19. Besides, ODK has shifted all its existing workshops as part of several Projects to online. Stay safe everyone! Cheers from Kosovo.
🐰 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).
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Until next month — keep up the good work!
Team Code for All
(Kelly, Sofía & Lorin)
