Water volunteers with their samples, taking part in our recent exchange with Code for Africa 🌍 + Code for Germany 🇩🇪 + OpenUp 🇿🇦 [Photo by Code for Africa]

Code for All Newsletter — March 2021

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

Lorin Camargo

Published in

Code for All

6 min readMar 23, 2021

👋 Hello civic tech friends

Welcome to your March update from Code for All. It’s been a sad, yet exciting month for us as we’re getting ready to farewell the incredible Kelly Halseth from the Code for All team. Kelly will be taking the opportunity to join a Working Artist Program at a pottery studio in Berlin, and will be building her own pottery business! We’ll miss Kelly’s thoughtful leadership, big-picture thinking, and her knack for inspiring our team to always bring our full selves to work. If you want to check out her pottery, you can find her on Instagram at @rebelheartceramics.

And now for your global civic tech updates!

⏰ 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.

Code for All is hiring! We’re seeking a part-time Communications Assistant to join our team starting in June! If you or someone you know would be perfect for this role, please check out and share our job call. Applications are open until March 31st.
We’ve started making moves to organize the Code for All 2021 Summit! The exact date hasn’t been set but it will likely take place during the last week of September. Let us know which themes/topics you’d like to see at Summit by answering this one-question survey 🙌
If you know of any great video producers who have experience in both animation and interview-style videos, please let us know! We may be hiring someone soon to help us create a short promotional video.

✨ Code for All Updates

We’ve launched an Open Call for our latest Exchange! This funding opportunity, which is open to Network Members, is focused on Disinformation and Fact-checking projects. Find details here, and apply by March 28th.
We’re currently designing our first Communities of Practice (CoPs) meetings for 2021. The themes are: Digital Citizen Engagement, Good Governance and Disinformation. We’ll be sharing details on the dates and times with you soon! Reach out to @sofia on Slack if you want to learn more about the CoPs.
Sofía Corona, our Communities of Practice Manager, recently spoke with Devex as part of the NDI #ChangingTheFaceOfPolitics media partnership, about how civic tech can advance gender equality. Read the Q&A here.
Our first cohort of the Effective Online Engagement Workshop with Lina Patel 🇦🇺 wrapped up and the second cohort began last week! We’re super happy with how the first round went and can’t wait to see how the second one goes.
We’re currently working with the amazing Lissett García Albornoz 🇨🇱 to redesign our branding and website! Reply to this email to let us know if you’d like to be included in the user research phase of the redesign (this is where we’ll ask for your opinion on logo and website design options).

📰 Member Updates

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

Code for Africa 🌍 + Code for Germany 🇩🇪 + OpenUp 🇿🇦 have wrapped up their recent Water Wazi Exchange — they’ve been working together to create a repository for global water data to support those who lack access to clean water. Read all about it here.
Ciudadanía Inteligente 🌎 In a few weeks one of the most important elections in the history of Chile will be held. That’s why at Ciudadania Inteligente, we’re working on our project Chile marks preference, so that all citizens can review and compare the position of the main political actors on more than 20 key issues and in this way encourage a conscious vote. In addition, we already have 100 people registered for our School of Digital Activism where we will deliver completely free tools to activists in Latin America to support collective action in times of COVID.
Civic Tech Sweden 🇸🇪We had a very popular lab on Community Tools in February that you can read about on our blog and in our forum. What more labs should we do this year? We would love to hear your thoughts in our poll!
Code for Africa 🌍WanaData, CfA’s pan-African network of women data scientists, journalists and technologists, hosted a three-day event for International Women’s Day where speakers shared how they choose to challenge gender discrimination. We have also joined the Partnership on AI global community to address the threats to public discourse that AI brings. Plus our Data Academy bagged another win for a project we partnered on with the Pulitzer Centre, Sucked Dry — an investigation on land grabs in the Nile River Basin.
Code for Australia 🇦🇺It’s been a busy summer for us, with three Fellowship teams at different stages of delivery, including the new NSW DPIE Fellowship — who are working in the exciting “Rules as Code” space. We also launched a Community of Practice platform and shared our plans for the launch of two new services this year.
Code for Canada 🇨🇦is celebrating the launch of MOVE, a two-year collaboration with the City of Toronto that has modernized how Canada’s largest city collects and uses traffic data. In addition to replacing legacy data systems that were built in the 1990s, the project led to significant digital capacity building and transformation inside of Toronto’s Transportation Services Department. Learn more about MOVE on our blog, or stay tuned to our YouTube channel for a video recap of our Open House with the MOVE team.
Code for Japan 🇯🇵We are promoting the provision of online communication, including decidim, as a means for local governments to communicate with citizens.
Code for Pakistan 🇵🇰 We’re currently working with the provincial Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) government to conceptualise, design and develop a “Super App” to serve as a single source of public services in KP.
mySociety 🇬🇧Looking forward to starting work on new AlaveteliPro upgrades and installs in Hungary, Greece, Ukraine and Croatia in April! Also, don’t forget: TICTeC Show and Tells start soon! First one is on 23rd March 2021.
Open Data Kosovo 🇽🇰was chosen as a regional hub to monitor the research on Kosovo and Albania as part of the Global Data Barometer. The GDB is a critical new benchmark on country-level data governance, data capability, data availability, and data use for the public good. By this year, we will share the research/deliverable with our audience.

💻 Job Opportunities

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

Code for All Communications Assistant
Code for Pakistan Country Director
Code for Africa All Openings
Code for America All Openings

🎉 Events

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

[March — May] TICTeC Show & Tells
[May 12–13] Code for America Summit
[June 7–11] RightsCon
[September] Code for All Summit (More details coming soon!)
Civic Tech Field Guide Event Calendar

📚 Reading Room

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

🐰 That’s all folks!

To get in touch with Code for All, hit reply to this email or find us on Slack (@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, Nonso & Lorin)