Team Project Lockdown meeting virtually! Project Lockdown is part of Code for All Exchange Program. You can read about it here [Photo by The IO Foundation]

Code for All Newsletter — May 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 readMay 14, 2021

👋 Welcome

It’s been a busy couple of months for our team as we’ve been navigating some big role changes and have been getting ready to welcome in a new team member! A lot of projects have recently wrapped up, and some new ones are beginning. We’ve started Summit prep, and can’t wait to see you all in September! Read on for details about Summit and also find updates from 13 of our member organizations below.

✨ Code for All Updates

We’ve officially set the date for our 2021 virtual Summit! Be ready to join us this coming September 27–30th, where we’ll bring the global civic tech community together through lightning talks, panels, workshops and more 🎉
Our Project Lockdown (PL) Exchange recently wrapped up! PL is an open source, civic tech initiative that aims to map lockdown policies from around the world that have popped up in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more about the project here.
We’ve held 3 Communities of Practice (CoPs) meetings over the past couple of months. The topics of our CoPs are: Digital Citizen Engagement, Good Governance and Disinformation. You can join these communities through our Slack workspace (look for channels: #citizen-engagement #good-governance #disinformation)
We’ve launched our new Support Squads program and have decided on the specific squads that will be forming. The squads will be: Funding & Partnerships, Program Management / Direction, Communications & Marketing and Product Design! Support Squads is a program where we will bring together staff members from our Member organizations who work in similar roles, so they can learn from and support each other.

📰 Member Updates

Here find updates from a handful of our 30+ member organizations.

Ciudadanía Inteligente 🌎 After a successful call with more than 600 applications from all corners of Latin America, our School of Digital Activism has started. This is a project (with support from the Karibu Foundation) where we provide free tools so that activists from all over Latin America can begin to promote social change through digital media and tools. Learn more about Ciudadanía Inteligente here!
Civic Tech Sweden 🇸🇪 is organising a two-part lab about Climate (Citizens) assemblies on 18 and 20 May! With awesome guests such as the makers of the Danish climate assembly and a Swedish citizen lobby! It’s free and open to anyone, register here!
Code for Africa 🌍 Read AfricanDRONE’s report on how hostels originally built for mine workers in South Africa have perpetuated racial inequities. Read our CEO Justin Arenstein and Investigations Manager at ANCIR Allan Cheboi’s insights on how disinfo undermines public trust and democracy across Africa. Read our report on how Africa ranks on 2021’s Press Freedom Index. 🏆 WanaData fellow Tobore Ovuorie won DW’s 2021 Freedom of Speech Award. ‘Sucked Dry’ has won a second award for an investigation on land grabs in the Nile River Basin, a project our Data Academy worked on along with InfoNile and the Pulitzer Centre.
Code for America 🇺🇸 is holding our annual Code for America summit this week. Our Brigade Network has launched an ambitious ReVisioning Project to redefine the primary purpose and value of our Network. Together with the team at Open Source Politics and Digidem Labs, we’ve created an online, participatory process for ReVisioning by piloting an instance of Decidim.
Code for Australia 🇦🇺 We’ve been super busy wrapping up a few Fellowships — one with Sydney’s largest Council where we built a dashboard application for staff members and increased capability throughout the organisation — check out the demo here. We’re also working with the New South Wales Government on a Rules as Code project wherein we’re turning policy intro code — find out more here. Our volunteer program Civic Makers are finishing off the design phase of their climate change project — fill in their survey here. Finally, we’re working on some brand new programs which we can’t wait to share with you all soon!
Code for Canada 🇨🇦 The C4C team is thrilled to introduce our new Executive Director: Dorothy Eng! Dorothy (or Dot as we call her) has been with Code for Canada since the beginning, serving first as a Board member and then our Director of Partnerships. She’s a committed civic technologist and is also one of the co-founders of Civic Tech Toronto. You can get to know Dorothy more, and learn about her vision for Code for Canada on our blog.
Code for Germany 🇩🇪 As spring finally comes around in Germany, we highlight a project that chloro-fills 🌱us with joy: The local volunteer group in Leipzig developed the app “Giess den Kiez” (‘Water your hood’) for their city. With Giess den Kiez, locals can adopt a tree in their neighbourhood and keep a watering journal! 💦 🌳This project was realized in cooperation between the local Code for Leipzig volunteers, CityLAB Berlin and others. It’s a great example of how knowledge transfer and collaboration can work smoothly between cities, when the workload is distributed evenly, and volunteers are supported by government-(funded) structures.
Code for Japan 🇯🇵 is excited to announce the launch of Civic Tech Accelerator Programs and the Second Civic Tech Challenge Cup U-22! These programs aim to provide technical, financial, and professional support to emerging civic tech services dedicated to solving social equity issues in Japan. We also welcomed new full-time members on the team as we are expanding our other projects, such as the development of City OS for smart cities across the country.
Code for Pakistan 🇵🇰 We published our latest Annual Report 2020 on our website.
Codeando México 🇲🇽 co-hosted DataConMX 2021 this week, with conversations about national open data policy, the evolution of open data in México, open data success stories, and more!
mySociety 🇬🇧 We have our next TICteC show and tell on May 25th 2021! Please do come along: Empowering communities using geospatial technology Tickets, Tue 25 May 2021 at 15:00
Open Data Kosovo 🇽🇰 As part of the Global Data Barometer, we’ve successfully finished the recruitment process for researchers from Kosovo and Albania. In the following months the report will be conducted and shared with everyone. Stay tuned!
OpenUp 🇿🇦 has been working on two projects in partnership with Local Municipalities in the Western Cape province with the aim to enhance and digitise public participation, the Citizen Engagement App and Public Participation Guide. These tools promote two-way communication, establish digital pathways for participation, and are designed to support citizens by informing, empowering, and activating them throughout the entire process.

💻 Job Opportunities

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

Code for Africa All Openings
Code for America All Openings
mySociety All Openings

🎉 Events

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

[May 12–13] Code for America Summit
[May 18 & 20] Civic Tech Lab: Can citizen assemblies help us tackle climate change?
[May 25] Empowering communities using geospatial technology
[June 7–11] RightsCon
[September 27–30] Code for All Summit (More details coming soon!)

📚 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).

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Until next time — keep up the good work!

Team Code for All

(Sofía, Nonso & Lorin)