Code for Atlanta October updates: Join us for Civic Spark Day

Have you ever wanted to learn to code, but just haven’t started? Or do you have a friend or colleague like that? We’re excited to announce Civic Spark Day on November 3 at Flatiron School!

https://www.codeforatlanta.org/spark

Civic Spark Day is a day of learning and brainstorming led by Code for Atlanta. The day opens with an introduction to civic tech as a national and global movement. Then, attendees will participate in a beginner-level workshop on web development. Lunch will consist of roundtable conversations on local civic issues. Following that will be a workshop on building a neighborhood website. To close Civic Spark Day, attendees will gather together for a collective brainstorm on potential civic projects.

Code for Atlanta organizer Dr. Faith Wallace has designed the workshop curriculum and will lead instruction. Teaching assistants will be available to help attendees during the workshops.

Civic Spark Day is for true novices to coding: people who’ve never coded before but want to learn. The workshops will focus on website development: HTML, CSS, and a little JavaScript. We particularly invite members of Atlanta’s civic and social innovation community to attend.

Space is limited to 20 attendees, so we ask that you fill out an application for admission. Admission is free.

https://goo.gl/forms/bUQQW4zzD85GWQAf1

Projects

We’ve recently added some new projects at civic hack night. Attending our hack nights is the best way to get involved in our projects. We’ve also 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.

• Campaign Finance API (#campaign-finance): We’re scraping money-in-politics data from the Georgia Campaign Finance Commission and making it available in a developer-friendly API.
• Uplift with Kindness (#stop-bullying): We’re a group of parents who have created this campaign to reduce the bullying and childhood suicide rate here in Georgia. Our goal is to raise awareness in Georgia by getting 100,000 people to sign up for free and participate on Unity Day, October 24, in honor of National Bullying Prevention Month.
• Open Checkbook (#open-checkbook): The City of Atlanta’s recently released the Open Checkbook data portal on government spending. We’re doing data analyses and hosting our findings on data.world.
• Virtual Sheet Music (#virtual-sheet-music): We’re using AR/VR glasses to help low-vision people read sheet music, especially while performing.