Happy 2021 from Code for All!

Code for All Newsletter — January 2021

Our bi-monthly newsletter is one of the ways we share updates, resources, and opportunities from within the global civic tech community.

👋 Welcome

After taking some time off at the end of 2020, we’ve started the new year feeling fresh and ready for just about anything. We’ve welcomed in a new team member, making us a small team that’s now spread over 4 continents (Africa, Australia, Europe & North America), and we’ve also been doing a lot of in depth work lately to make our organization more equitable and inclusive. We can’t wait to see where this year takes us, and after the last one, we think we can handle a lot. So here it goes!

⏰ 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.

• We’ve created a survey that, with your input, may help us better understand what worked well at Code for All last year and what could be improved going forward. Please share your feedback with us here — we’d love to hear what you think!
• To make our 2020 Summit happen, we had incredible help from our Summit Working Group (big thanks to Code for Australia, whose entire team was in the group)! We’re already starting to organize our 2021 Summit (it will be in September!) and we’d like to start gauging interest to find out who wants to join this year’s working group. Please reply to this email or reach out to us on Slack (@lorin) if you’re interested in learning more about it.
• We’ll be revamping our website over the next few months, and will be hiring a contract UX/UI Designer / Front-end developer who is familiar with Wordpress. If you or someone you know would be perfect for this, please let us know! Reply to this email or reach out to Kelly at kelly@codeforall.org.

✨ Code for All Updates

• We’re very excited to announce that we have a new team member onboard! Nonso Jideofor has joined as our new Fundraising & Partnerships Manager. Nonso is also currently working with us as our Equity & Inclusion Consultant — we just can’t get enough of him! Please join us in giving Nonso a big warm welcome to the network.
• We’re also incredibly excited to be working with Lina Patel this year, who’s helping us improve the way we and our 31 member organizations design and deliver online meetings. Learn more about Lina and what she hopes to accomplish with us here.
• With conference season approaching in the coming months, we thought it might be useful to gather some tips and tricks for how to write better conference proposals. If you’re interested in speaking/presenting at a civic tech conference this year, check out what we’ve learned!
• After sharing COVID-19 project highlights from around the globe in April of last year, we decided to follow up with a small handful of organizations to see how their projects have sustained, what challenges they’ve faced, and what advice they would give to other civic tech organizations. Here’s what we found.

📰 Member Updates

Here find updates from a handful of our 31 member organizations.

• Code for Germany 🇩🇪 + OpenUp 🇿🇦 + Code for Africa 🌍 In the last few months, we’ve been working with the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism to set up a Water Commons. Many of you supported us with water data and information from your regions and shared your own water-related projects. Now, we would like to share with you all what has become of this. In a short webinar we’d like to introduce the project to you, present our results and discuss our findings and future engagement. Join us here on February 4th, 3–4 PM CEST (convert to your timezone here).
• Codeando México 🇲🇽 + Code for Australia 🇦🇺 We’ve wrapped up our Tech for Non Tech exchange, which you can read about here in English, and here in Spanish!
• Civic Tech Sweden 🇸🇪 We have launched a new forum! You can also read about upcoming civic tech related events and subscribe to our calendar on our website.
• Code for Africa 🌍 After a summer break, we’ve started the new year running. Our partners, DFRlabs, uncovered suspicious accounts and pages on Twitter and Facebook attempting to manipulate public opinion before the Ugandan elections that took place on 14 January. Our fact-checking unit, PesaCheck also covered the elections, debunking misinformation that emerged both before and after the country took to the polls. Continuing their fight against fake news, PesaCheck has also launched a WhatsApp tipline, allowing citizens to report dodgy information.
• Code for Australia 🇦🇺 We’ve kicked off the year strong! We have a brand new Fellowship kicking off in early February where our Fellows will be working on a ‘Rules as Code’ project wherein they’ll be translating rules in legislation, regulation & policy into code so they can be consumed and interpreted by computers. We’re also setting up some Communities of Practice and we’d love to hear from other network members who have done so successfully. 2021 will see us dream up some new products which we’re incredibly excited about, as well as settle into some existing offerings. Finally, we’d love to hear from people in our global civic tech community in our community survey!
• Code for Canada 🇨🇦 We’ve officially kicked off the search for our next Executive Director. We’re looking for an inclusive and accomplished leader who’s passionate about civic tech and capable of building strong teams and partnerships. If that sounds like someone you know, encourage them to apply. Thanks!
• Code for Japan 🇯🇵 The winner of the Civictech challenge Cup U-22,*Civichat* participated in a session at g0v summit with a high school intern of Code for Japan. They shared about the project and introduced the demonstration experiments with local governments.
• Code for Pakistan 🇵🇰 We closed out 2020 on high note, organising our first ever online and global Civic Hackathon. We had fun exploring new tools to engage with participants and learned a lot about running a virtual event. In total, we received 700+ applications, from six countries (Pakistan, Canada, Finland, Saudi Arabia, the UK and the US), and from 90+ towns/cities within Pakistan. Out of 43 projects submitted, 12 were shortlisted and three winners were selected. During the virtual Closing Ceremony, Chief Guest Asad Umar, Federal Minister for Planning, Development and Special Initiatives, shared a special message for the participants as well.
• mySociety 🇬🇧 It’s been a busy start to 2021, being in the middle of a new lockdown (not what we wanted! Hope Covid will disappear this year!). We’re working on a fault reporting discovery project for NHS hospitals alongside prioritising our climate work. We’re also hiring!
• Sinar Project 🇲🇾 We shared a talk on Rapidly Building An Extensible Corruption Tool And Publishing Platform Using Open Data Standards in Plone Conference 2020 Online. Together with partners Perludem Perkumpulan untuk Pemilu dan Demokrasi and Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, we’ve started publishing open data for election monitoring in Southeast Asia at Datatalk.asia. We’ve been working with Internews Malaysia and Data-N with support from the EU to organise a second Data Journalism Workshop, which will be held in February 2021, currently open for applications until 4 Feb.

💻 Job Opportunities

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

• mySociety Project Manager, SocietyWorks
• Code for Pakistan Country Director and Storytelling/Outreach Manager
• Code for Africa All Openings
• Code for America All Openings

🌍 Events around the world

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

• [Jan 28] Launching of Datatalk.asia: The Trends of Democracy, Open Data and Data Journalism in Southeast Asian Elections
• [Feb 04] Water Commons Webinar (tune in between 3–4pm CEST)
• [Feb 19, 20, 26, 27] Supercharge Your Reporting: Data Journalism Workshop 2.0
• [March 06] Open Data Day
• [March 08–21] Mozilla Festival
• [September] Code for All Summit (More details coming soon!)

📚 Reading Room

Here’s a list of some of our latest and most-read articles.

• Introducing our Meeting Magician: Lina Patel
• Introducing our Equity & Inclusion Consultant: Nonso Jideofor
• 5 tips to make your conference proposal shine
• A beginner’s guide to civic tech
• The Summit that wasn’t and the Summit that was
• Black Lives Matter — Statement from Code for All
• 8 Months Later — Civic Tech Takes on a Pandemic
• Civic Tech Takes on a Pandemic

🐰 That’s all folks!

To get in touch with Code for All, hit reply to this email or find us on Slack (@kelly she/her, @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 time — keep up the good work!

Team Code for All

(Kelly, Sofía & Lorin)