Attendees at our Summit session Can’t Stop Columbus: A Community Response to COVID-19.

Code for All Newsletter — November 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

Code for All

7 min readNov 6, 2020

👋 Welcome

It’s been a productive month for the Code for All core team. We’ve hired a new consultant to help us with equity and inclusion (more to come on this next month), we’re in the process of reviewing applications for our Fundraising & Partnerships Manager role and have also been meeting with Lina Patel, who is helping us improve our online meetings & engagement.

Sofía recently celebrated Dia de Muertos in México City, Lorin has been enjoying the Australian sun & has been working outside any chance she gets, and Kelly has been making music in her spare time in Berlin!

We have quite a few updates below, read on to find out what’s been happening.

⏰ 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.

If you haven’t already, read our statement in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. The statement is signed by 16 of our Member organizations and has been translated into Japanese, Polish, German, Spanish & French. If you or anyone you know would be interested in translating the statement into another language, reply to this email to let us know!
Code for Japan has recently translated our Beginner’s Guide to Civic Tech into Japanese! If anyone is interested in translating our guide into another language, please let us know (reply to this email or reach out in the #translations channel on Slack).

The Code for All core team meeting with Lina Patel of Revma Consulting earlier this year.

🎉 Code for All Updates

Great news! We’ve launched an open call for our next Exchange! This exchange is focused on collaboration between civic tech and civil society organizations. Applications are open until December 31st! If you have any questions, you can reach out to Sofía on Slack (@sofia) or send her an email at sofia@codeforall.org.
One of our Member organizations, mySociety, is working with the Privacy Collective on a 10 billion Euro lawsuit against Oracle and Salesforce. Rebecca Rumbul, Head of Research at mySociety, claims that these companies have been hoovering up personal data through their AdTech cookies and auctioning it off to third party advertisers. All without the meaningful or legitimate consent that the GDPR in Europe requires. The claim is being brought in England, Wales, and the Netherlands, and represents the largest claim in history under GDPR. Code for All has voted to support this action. To show your support and to find out more, click here.

✨ PROJECT UPDATE ✨

Here’s the latest on our Water Wazi exchange, which is a collaboration between Code for Africa, Code for Germany, and OpenUp:

The Water Wazi project is growing! We’ve reached out to several members of the Code for All Network to learn more about other water-related projects. Thank you all for the exciting and helpful insights into your work and the work of your communities!

In the next few months, we’ll support two groups of journalists in data-driven reporting on the right to water. CCIJ selected two proposals: Cynthia Boll who documents personal stories of people who live with the consequence of land subsidence and “Sinking Cities”. And Peter Luhanga, Steve Kretzmann, Nombulelo Damba-Hendrik, and Nompumelelo Mswati who report on polluted rivers, “Rivers of Sewage” in South Africa. Code for Africa also plans to work with InfoNile, a collective of geo-data journalists, on water-related issues.

Additionally, we seek to create a collection of water-related news stories, apply text mining techniques to extract information from stories, and analyse the database to identify useful insights that can contribute to the Water Data Commons. With this “Water” search tool we aim to create a global dataset of water-related issues which will be timely and include details which are absent from traditional datasets.

As a third component, we continue our research and development of a water data standard to assess drinking water quality around the world. Because water quality data can be expensive to produce, one potential partnership that has generated a lot of excitement for the Water Wazi team is MiniSASS. They take a decidedly “citizen science” approach in measuring water health by simply counting macroinvertebrates (small animals) at any freshwater site. Adi Eyal has been discussing potential collaboration with MiniSASS developers, and we’re hopeful their data might serve as one of the bedrock measures of water quality in our platform.

Our Code for All Summit session Code for Fellowships: Remote Working for Success, which featured speakers from Code for Pakistan, Code for Australia, Code for America & Code for Canada.

📰 Member Updates

Ciudadanía Inteligente 🌎 Chile has made history. After a referendum, the Chilean citizenry (at nearly 80%) decided to bury the Pinochet constitution and write a new one. In Ciudadanía Inteligente we launched a platform where citizens can review and compare the position of the main political actors on more than 20 key issues.
Civic Tech Sweden 🇸🇪 You can find all our upcoming civic tech related events and subscribe to our calendar here!
Code for Africa 🌍 The WanaData team of women data scientists, journalists and technologists excelled in 2020, winning several awards that recognized their hard work. The investigators at DFRlab, a Code for Africa partner, released hard-hitting articles exposing the truth behind the #EndSARS Lekki toll gate massacre in Nigeria and revealed the person capitalising off of racially charged content in South Africa.
Code for Australia 🇦🇺 Aside from being kept busy with our current Fellowships, we’ve also been working hard to re-launch our volunteer-led program Civic Makers. You can view the work we’re doing on our first project — a data-visualisation tool that tells the story of climate change policy in Australia- here. We’re also running our final open Tech for Non Tech class for the year (check out how we pivoted to online delivery here.) Finally, our exchange of the Tech for Non Tech program with Codeando México is underway — we’re thrilled to be working with other network members!
Code for Germany 🇩🇪 On November 6th, Code for Germany, in cooperation with the Körber-Stiftung, will host the Forum Offene Stadt (Forum Open City). This online conference will be an exchange between civil society and administrations on Open Government in Germany.
Code for Pakistan 🇵🇰 A position paper titled Civic Fellowships: A Framework for Civic Technology Innovation in Pakistan, authored by Ibraheem Saleem, Ebtihaj Khan and Anam Zakaria, was selected and recently shared as part of the, “Civic Technologies: Research, Practice, and Open Challenges,” workshop during CSCW 2020 (23rd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing).
K-Monitor 🇭🇺 has started to actively use the Tech Kontra Virus platform to collect project ideas relating to COVID-19. K-Monitor (together with Funky Citizens, RO) is finishing its campaign about informal payment in maternity care. We collected more than 13,000 entries from mothers with the site “birth experience map”. We’ll publish the results this month.
mySociety 🇬🇧 Please join us for upcoming TICTeC Seminars! Also, we’re hiring — it’s a remote position, but you must be based in the UK.
Open Data Kosovo 🇽🇰 On October 29th, we organized a hybrid event for the official launch of the “Initiative for Open and Good Governance” Project. This project aims to restart the initiative of making Kosovo a member of the Open Government Partnership (OGP). ODK, in collaboration with Fundacja ePaństwo, K-Monitor, KohoVolit.eu, and Metamorphosis Foundation have started the implementation of the alGOVrithms 2.0 project, which introduces the use of algorithms within governments.
Sinar Project 🇲🇾 in collaboration with Open Development Mekong will be the regional community hub for Asia for the upcoming Global Data Barometer. This will involve setting up a community Internet access centre while doing a social audit.