Code for All 2020 Summit is almost here!

Code for All Newsletter — July 2020

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

👋 Welcome

Hello civic tech friends and welcome to our July newsletter! This last month we’ve been focused on a mixture of grant writing and preparation for the upcoming Code for All Summit. Please join us this month on July 14th, 20th & 22nd for a chance to connect with folks from all over the global civic tech community and discuss topics within the themes of Collaboration, Skill-Building and the Civic Tech Response to COVID-19. We hope to see you all there!

⏰ 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.

• [10 minutes] Please take a look at our upcoming Summit sessions! We’ll have attendees joining us from different time zones across the globe, and because of this we’ve set up event pages for each individual session over the three days. Please take a moment to go through our list of individual sessions for the event and register directly for the sessions that you will be able to attend.
• [10 minutes] Please help us spread the word about our upcoming Code for All Summit with your networks — we’re just about one week away from the first day of Summit and want to make sure folks from all over the network are aware of the sessions coming up! Here is a template you can use for speedy sharing.

🎉 Code for All Updates

• The first day of the Code for All Summit is coming up on July 14th, with opening remarks starting at 5:30 UTC. Our Summit Working Group has been meeting weekly to organize this event, which is almost entirely volunteer-run. A big thank you to the Code for Australia base team for all their work helping us put the Summit together! We’re excited to see you all later this month :)
• Code for All, with the input of several Network Members, has written a statement in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. This statement has been signed by 16 of our Member organizations and has been shared in three (soon to be five) languages in addition to English.
• We’ve finished putting together our 2020 Member Needs Assessment. Thank you again to everyone who took the time to meet with us and answer our questions earlier this year.
• We’re in the process of applying for a grant renewal from NED and are submitting the application this week! A huge thank you to Code for America, SKWallis, folks from ExCo (Code for Africa & OpenUp), Victoria Welbourn of NDI, and Krzysztof Izdebski of the ePaństwo Foundation for assisting in the grant writing process.
• We’re wrapping up our time with Revma Consulting. The time we’ve spent with Lina Patel of Revma Consulting has been invaluable to the Core Team and we are excited to use what we’ve learned to continue developing strategy that will move the Network forward. A report will be made available soon from Revma Consulting about what has been revealed and accomplished during the course of this consultation.

📰 Member Updates

• Ciudadanía Inteligente 🌎 The health emergency has limited citizens’ rights and increased the powers of governments to increase surveillance, control and, in many cases, pass drastic executive orders using the emergency as an excuse. Because of this, at Ciudadanía Inteligente we decided to raise our voices and bring together our great activist network from 14 Countries, COLECTIVA. The plan: “Make democracy viral during COVID-19” — What happens to our rights when freedom is threatened? Covid is NOT an excuse to normalize violence on the Internet. Covid is NOT an excuse to give up our data and our privacy. Covid is NOT an excuse for surveillance and secrecy by companies and governments. Check our work here.
• Code for Australia 🇦🇺 Busy times in Aus, having kicked off a brand new Fellowship this month with our first not-for-profit, Logan Together! We’re also recruiting for another remote Fellowship with the Queensland Government. Our team has also started sharing our learnings from the redevelopment of our policies and procedures which you can read here. Finally, we’re re-booting Tech for Non Tech for online delivery.
• Code for Canada 🇨🇦 The #code4ca crew has just launched recruitment for their next cohort of fellows! If you’re eligible to work in Canada, and want to use your skills to build a more user-centred government, check it out! Applications are open until July 17, 2020.
• Code for Japan 🇯🇵 launched an application to prepare for a potential second spike of COVID-19 infections — this project is operated by a volunteer engineering group made up of mostly university and high-school students. This application, “Home Class Timetable”, is a web app that enables teachers who work at K-12 schools to share their teaching plans to students who cannot attend school in person.
• Code for Netherlands 🇳🇱 organized a “public gallery” during the open market consultation for the “covid-19 notification-app” and is now organizing the community around the government development of this app. Also, they are working on some community (micro)tools, like pitchdeck.codefor.nl and community profiles, and experimenting with rancher infrastructure for CI/CD.
• Code for Pakistan 🇵🇰 kicked off our sixth cycle of the KP Government Innovation Fellowship Program, starting with an online Pre-Fellowship Bootcamp in the first week of June for this year’s cohort of 20 Fellows. As we are running the Fellowship program online this year, and transitioning to remote work is new for most people, the KP team arranged a three-day online Pre-Fellowship Bootcamp, designed to ease our 2020 Fellows into the Program, and teach them about the essentials of telecommuting, online collaboration and how to easily navigate their way around this new way of working. In other news, Sheba Najmi, Code for Pakistan’s Founder and Executive Director, spoke at the Global Pakistan Tech Summit on Sunday, June 28th. During a fireside chat with Huma Hamid (co-founder of Pakistan Women in Computing), Sheba spoke about CfP’s work to build a strong civic innovation ecosystem by increasing civic engagement, promoting responsive citizen-centered government, and supporting innovation in the public sector. Watch the full interview here.
• Code for Poland 🇵🇱 has launched a traditional newsletter, where we will share news from both the Code for Poland and the Code for All network. We have suspended the launch of the WarsawLO project in the capital city due to problems with obtaining data from the Warsaw authorities — we will not give up. In other news, we are promoting a new project in our network called “Impakt”, which is an application for trade unions and social movements. It will help your supporters find each other, organize, convince their friends to get involved and stay safe from overreach and violence. Take a look at their website. We’re also working with sociologists from the University of Nicolaus Copernicus to research users of Sensor.Community (Luftdaten) so that we can better understand their needs before the upcoming smog season. We’re also working on a useful tool that will help make calculation easier for data analysts.
• Open Data Kosovo 🇽🇰 organized an online hackathon with the beneficiaries of Code4Kamenica project.
• Waag 🇳🇱 released the English version of the Roadmap for the Digital Future. Originally developed for the Dutch parliament, the roadmap uncovers how assumptions and values are embedded within technology, and how we can develop a society with alternative technologies that are more in line with our public values.

🐰 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).

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Until next month — keep up the good work!

Team Code for All

(Kelly, Sofía & Lorin)