Attendees at one of our recent Code for All Summit sessions, Code for Fellowships: Remote Working for Success, which featured speakers from Code for Pakistan, Code for Australia, Code for America and Code for Canada.

Code for All Newsletter — August 2020

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

Lorin Camargo

Published in

Code for All

7 min readSep 7, 2020

👋 Welcome

Hello civic tech friends and welcome to our August update! We’ve had a busy month wrapping up grant proposals, reviewing exchange applications and hosting our first virtual conference: the Code for All 2020 Summit! We’re excited about everything we’ve learned through the process of organizing and participating in Summit and we hope that if you were able to attend, you found it a useful and energizing experience. Read on for details about Summit, our upcoming exchange program, and also find updates from 10 of our member organizations below.

Note: the Code for All newsletter is taking a holiday this September — the next newsletter will come out in October of this year!

⏰ Sixty Minute Sprint

Where you’ll find the stuff that’s most pressing for the network, which won’t ever be more than an hour of your time, total.

[5 minutes] If you attended any of our recent Summit sessions, please leave us some feedback here — we’d love to take your thoughts into account before organizing future online events and next year’s Summit!
[5 minutes] Please help us by sharing links to any interesting/exciting civic tech events that are coming up to the #events channel on the Code for All Slack workspace.

A shot from our Summit session on Code for Japan’s Response to COVID-19.

🎉 Code for All Updates

This last month we hosted our first virtual Summit! We had a great turn out with over 150 participants from 30+ countries. Thank you to everyone who joined us as organizers, speakers and/or participants! If you weren’t able to catch all of the sessions you were interested in, here you can find notes & slides and recordings from most (not all) of our sessions. Thanks again so much for your participation & support!
We’re excited to announce that grantees for our Code for All 2020 Exchange Program have been selected! We have two exchanges starting this year: Water Wazi & Tech for Non Tech México. Here’s a quick description of each project:

Water Wazi: A collaboration between OpenUp (South Africa), Code for Germany and Code for Africa will seek to leverage the Code for All network to reach organizations globally who would benefit or contribute to a water data commons. In 2010 the UN declared access to clean water a universal human right that is essential to the enjoyment of all other rights. Despite this, a billion people globally do not have access to clean water and adequate sanitation. The Water Wazi project will result in an enlarged data set about water globally, specifically including information about South and sub-Saharan Africa, Germany, and other Code for All member countries.

Tech for Non Tech México: Early last year, Code for Australia participated in a Code for All exchange for Tech for Non Tech (T4NT), handing over the program to OpenUp and Code for Japan. Code for Australia will now work with Codeando México to get T4NT started up in México. This will involve translating the program into Spanish, which will potentially lead to handover for other organizations in Latin America. Code for Australia has also recently redesigned the program for online delivery and are keen to formalize the sharing of this work as part of the exchange process.

Our Communities of Practice (CoPs) Manager, Sofía Corona and SlashRoots Foundation’s Senior Service Designer, Denique Ferguson, recently gave the workshop “Giving citizens a voice: how can we build digital citizen engagement indicators and standards?” at AccessNow’s RightsCon conference. They shared insights and challenges that came from last year’s Digital Citizen Engagement Research, focusing specifically on indicators and standards for monitoring and evaluating civic tech projects, and also shared work that has been done within the Network regarding the Civic Tech Framework.

A graphic shared during our Summit session Can’t Stop Columbus: A Community Response to COVID-19.

📰 Member Updates

Ciudadanía Inteligente 🌎 Rio de Janeiro 🇧🇷 is one of the 10 most unequal metropolises in the world. The Metropolitan Region, with 13 million inhabitants distributed in 22 cities, has some of the worst indicators of human and social development in Brazil. The electoral framework of 2020 brings many concerns and challenges, especially for social leaders, civil society and activist movements that have been mobilizing politics in their territories, trying to advance in overcoming these historical inequalities. In this context, we launched GIRO 2020 ⚡, an initiative in partnership with Casa Fluminense to make elections in Brazil more participatory and representative, with a territorialized public policy agenda aligned with the needs of citizenship.
Code for America 🇺🇸 is currently hiring Community Fellows with lived experience in program areas in Adams County, CO, Fort Collins, CO, Santa Barbara, CA, and Oakland, CA. We’re also organizing the 2020 National Day of Civic Hacking on September 12, 2020: Save the date!
Code for Australia 🇦🇺 Our team has been very busy with a new Fellowship having started and another kicking off next month! We’ve also finished a trial of Tech for Non Tech Online and received some amazing feedback from participants. The icing on the cake here has been getting our Exchange application with Codeando México approved so we can translate Tech for Non Tech into Spanish.
Code for Canada 🇨🇦 Fresh off of our most successful fellowship recruitment to date, the Code for Canada team is growing again: we’re hiring an Education Program Manager to help us deliver educational experiences tailored to the needs of public servants and civic techies! In other news, our in-flight fellows have been busy blogging (here’s an intro to agile from one team, and a guide to setting up cross-functional teams from another) and we’re continuing to provide COVID-19 support to government teams through our Open Call project.
Code for Japan 🇯🇵 have started the “OPEN EATS JAPAN” project, which standardizes information about restaurants and publishes it as open data. This project, in which several civic tech communities and companies cooperate, has been featured in the tech media and has been attracting attention.
Code for Pakistan 🇵🇰 launched our 2019 Impact Report this month. In this report, we look back at five years of the KP Government Innovation Fellowship Program and the impact the Program has had on facilitating citizens, improving public service delivery and enabling better governance.
Code for Romania 🇷🇴 We launched another app in the Covid-19 ecosystem, a medical journal for people to collect data about large audiences in order to help the Ministry of Health analyze potential vulnerable areas. We are currently working on a project for teachers working with kids with special needs, a donors platform and several other apps dedicated to vulnerable groups aside from our usual programs. Keeping busy!
Codeando México 🇲🇽 launched Directorio COVID-Mx, a tool that gathers, curates and systematizes relevant information according to each state. The platform provides information on: number of cases, local attention lines, risk state, relevant measures and restrictions, online tests, gender violence help desks, social programs, health centers and other relevant information.
g0v 🇹🇼 Summit 2020 Working Group is busy organizing g0v’s biannual gathering, this year in Tainan, Taiwan, on December 3–6. This year’s g0v Summit spans 4 days, at 7 venues, with 8 co-hosts. The physical event is outside of Taipei (Taiwan’s capital) for the first time so deeper local connections can be made. The call for proposal process is completely open to the public so the conversations begin before the summit does. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the working group is working hard to enable remote participation for both speakers and attendees, to ensure diversity and free exchange of ideas at this important event in this difficult time. Please join us in December! (written by chihao, co-chair of g0v Summit 2020)
Open Data Kosovo 🇽🇰 has launched the Techstitution 4.0 online training for youth. ODK is currently developing the first ever E-participation platform for Kosovo. As part of the Increasing Civic Engagement in the Digital Agenda project, the first Small Grants Scheme Cycle LOT 1: Awarding of sub-grants for the e-Government Support Centers will be soon released with further details regarding the application procedure.