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Members of the Code for Pakistan KP Government Innovation Fellowship team syncing up online.

Code for All Newsletter — May 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
7 min readMay 12, 2020

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👋 Welcome

Hello civic tech friends and welcome to our May update. A lot has happened in one short month, so we have quite a few updates to share below. Here are the things you need to know as well as some opportunities for you to get involved in making civic tech stronger around the world during this turbulent time.

⏰ 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.

Discussion topics created and voted on by attendees at our recent Code for All Board Meeting

🎉 Code for All Updates

  • We held our latest Board Meeting in April where folks from 10 of our Member organizations joined in to chat about current activities and discuss where our focus will be going forward. Some topics we covered include: plans for upcoming exchanges, how and where we can better share projects with each other, and the development of shared policies for disputes, harassment, and gender equity.
  • We’re currently organizing our upcoming online Summit which will be coming soon in the form of short online meetings. We’re aiming for the first sessions to take place in mid-late June and some of the meetings will include: project presentations, talk on civic tech best practices, something fun (and not so worky), and discussions around strategy for the Network going forward.
  • We’re currently working on the Network Needs Assessment. Right now, we’re analyzing data that was gathered through Member interviews conducted at the start of this year. We’ll be sure to update everyone further once we have more to report!
  • We held two Peer Learning Sessions in April on the topic of Best Practices for Facilitating Online Meetings and Events. Both sessions were hosted by the wonderfully wise Lina Patel and Melina Chan of the Ship Healthy collective. If you weren’t able to catch the sessions, you can watch the recordings here.
  • AccessNow Senior Policy Analyst and Global Data Protection Lead, Estelle Massé, shared with us important insights from their most current research “Recommendations on privacy and data protection in the fight against COVID-19”, focused on how the rights to privacy and data protection can be protected during this crisis and in the future. If you weren’t able to catch the sessions, you can watch the recordings here.
  • We’ve helped coordinate a recent episode of Civic Tech Chat which features Lina Patel of Code for Australia and Nao Myoshu of Code for Japan discussing the Tech for Non Tech Program. Take a listen here. Also, if you’re interested in featuring a story on Civic Tech Chat, reach out to @ryan-koch on the Code for All Slack.
  • Happy news on the conference front! The Personal Democracy Forum CEE will now be taking place online and is coming up next week on May 14th. Our very own Kelly will be presenting at the event, so be sure to tune in and take a listen! Check out details and register here.
Code for Australia’s Fun Friday Lunches continue online!

📰 Member Updates

  • Ciudadanía Inteligente 🌎In times of crisis, transparency is vital. It allows specialists and citizens to have data to make informed decisions and demand their rights. That is why we launched the study: ‘How much information do governments from Latin America provide about covid19?’ You can review it at https://ciudadaniai.org/covid19. Also, Our project <A+> for inclusive algorithms was recognized in the #FCWorldChangingIdeas awards in the Artificial Intelligence & Data category. We are proud to be nominated by Fast Company. We continue our work to build a more inclusive and feminist internet.
  • Code for Africa 🌍Our fact-checking programme in East Africa, PesaCheck, has expanded to include Mali, Burundi and Ethiopia with coverage in both French and Amharic. PesaCheck is also one of eight grantees to receive funding from the Coronavirus Fact-Checking Grant from the IFCN and Facebook to fight Covid-19 disinformation.
  • Code for Australia 🇦🇺 We launched our first app! Recycling 2.0 is now live — read a interview with our Fellows about the process. We also recently hosted our first Virtual Open House event to great success. View a recording here, and RSVP to next month’s event to find out more about the work we’re doing. Finally, with the need for new modes of delivery of our programs, we’ve been focussing on a re-design of our Tech for Non-Tech workshop which will see more flexibility around content as well as delivery — we’re very keen to chat to other members of the network about this so please get in touch!
  • Code for Canada 🇨🇦 C4C, along with the Canadian Digital Service and the Canada School of Public Service has launched Open Call, a catalogue of open source tools that all levels of government can use to bolster their response to COVID-19. The catalogue is in alpha at the moment, but we’re conducting outreach to local governments and learning more about their challenges. We know that many government teams are already stretched right now, so we’re also putting together a variety of supports to help public sector teams adapt and deploy open source tools, and we’re leveraging a community of civic tech practitioners and past Code for Canada fellows to deliver those supports. If you’ve got a suggestion for tools that should be included in the catalogue (we’re looking for solutions that have been deployed by or for governments) send us an email at appelouvert-opencall@cds.snc.ca.
  • Code for Germany 🇩🇪After the WirVsVirus hackathon last month, we are now focused on reaching out to municipalities in Germany to promote open data, civic tech and open government as tools to become more resilient to crises. We have written a handbook with our learnings and best practice experiences of the last years and offer administrations to support them in the crisis. We also work closely with the Prototype Fund to support our Code for Germany community. The Prototype Fund is a project that funds innovative FOSS initiatives with government grants. It will provide the structure to bring some of the hackathon projects into practice.
  • Code for Pakistan 🇵🇰We recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with a local NGO, Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Center (AHKRC), to collaborate on initiatives of mutual interest. We are working together to design and develop a job portal for AHKRC, which will benefit low-income communities in urban slums, and help connect them with potential employment opportunities. Since our project management and development teams were already working remotely on this project, we have been able to continue our work without much disruption amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing. Read more about the partnership with AHKRC here. We’ve also published a couple of blogs on working from home and managing teams remotely, as we all adjust to working from home amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
… and may the code be with you. Code for Romania celebrating Star Wars Day on Slack!

🔭 Funding Opportunities

This is where we share opportunities we’ve stumbled upon lately.

Information Technology

Democracy & Good Governance

Human Rights

Civil Society Development

COVID-19

Miscellaneous

At a recent leadership meeting by Code for San José (a Code for America Brigade) Co-Captain Yan-Yin Choy reveals her virtual background as a positive affirmation for the group (artwork by YallaRoza)

💻 Job Opportunities

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

🌍 Events around the world

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

A shot of the Code for All core team during a meeting with Lina Patel of Revma Consulting

🐰 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 month — keep up the good work!

Team Code for All

(Kelly, Sofía & Lorin)

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Lorin Camargo
Code for All

Written by Lorin Camargo

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