Code for Atlanta December updates: How you can contribute

Luigi Ray-Montañez
Code for Atlanta
Published in
3 min readDec 20, 2018

As we wrap up 2018, it’s time to reflect on all we’ve accomplished together this year. We held 23 civic hack nights, working on over 30 projects throughout the year. In March, we held the Atlanta Greenspace Hackathon in partnership with Park Pride, the City of Atlanta Department of Parks and Recreation, and several other non-profits and government agencies. Last month, we held Atlanta’s first Civic Spark Day where 18 folks completely new to coding learned how to build a website for their neighborhood.

This month’s update goes over three ways you can contribute to our ongoing success.

Donate

We’re an all-volunteer group, including those of us who lead the events. As such, we’re always looking for donations and sponsors. If your company can sponsor a few months of civic hack nights, it’d go a long way to keep our events going. Just reply to this email and we’ll send you a sponsorship prospectus.

If you’d like to give an individual donation, we’d gladly welcome that too. Our donation platform is hosted by our parent organization, Code for America. You can donate online here:

https://www.codeforatlanta.org/donate

Lead

We’re currently recruiting for new members to the leadership team for 2019. If you’ve been to our events and thought that you could help out, now is the time to step up! We’re recruiting a general pool of co-organizers who can take on assorted roles as needed. We ask that candidates commit to the following:

  1. Be available to attend and help out at all Code for Atlanta events: 2 hack nights per month, 2–3 hackathons per year
  2. Devote at least 5 hours each month to organizing work outside our events

Apply for the leadership team here:

https://goo.gl/forms/1WQHnY5lXbCON1802

Attend

Of course, showing up to our civic hack nights and participating in project groups is incredibly valuable as well. Many use it as an opportunity to strengthen their skillset and gain experience. Join our Meetup group if you haven’t yet:

http://www.meetup.com/codeforatlanta/

Here’s what we’ve been working on recently. We’ve posted the Slack channel (#channel-name) for each project group below. Join our Slack if you haven’t yet and want to get in touch with a group.

  • Election Money (#electionmoney): We’re scraping money-in-politics data from the Georgia Campaign Finance Commission and making it available in a developer-friendly API.
  • Human Impact Project of Atlanta (#mobile-health): We’re addressing the needs of people living with HIV/AIDS and prevention among High Risk Groups in Atlanta.
  • Virtual Sheet Music (#virtual-sheet-music): We’re using AR/VR glasses to help low-vision people read sheet music, especially while performing.
  • Free Live Transcript (#free-live-transcript): We’re building a web app that transcribes audio in real-time and is easily-editable. This provides free transcription for live events, making them more accessible and inclusive.
  • Uplift with Kindness (#stop-bullying): We’re a group of parents who have united to reduce the bullying, violence, and childhood suicide rate here in Georgia. Our current goal is to create an anti-bullying app that provides resources on bullying prevention, during the occurrence, and post occurrence solutions.

--

--