An Exciting Time at CFSJ!
👋 Welcome
Hello civic tech friends,
Check out our recap of May activities including Inclusive Product Week, project updates and resources for Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month
May is Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage month which gives tribute to the contributions of Asians and Pacific Islanders to American history. Since last year, Asian Americans have been attacked, fueled by the rhetoric that blamed people of Asian descent for the COVID-19 outbreak. Asian Americans continue to experience anti-Asian hate and violence. There is still work to be done. Check our February and March newsletters for additional resources. We need to Stop AAPI Hate.
Resources:
The Forgotten History of the Purging of Chinese from America
A Reading Guide on the Asian American Experience
14 Ways to Celebrate Asian Pacific Heritage Month at Work
AAPI Heritage Month: 10 Movies by Asian American, Pacific Islander Directors
Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities
✏️ Code for San Jose Updates
Code for San Jose hosted the first Inclusive Product Week conference. The conference had over 500 attendees listen to 30 thought leaders speak on topics ranging from cultural intelligence in product design, designing for cognitive bias and practicing inclusive fashion design. The event received great feedback from speakers and attendees. Thank you to Diane Labenz, CFSJ’s Director of Design and Usability, and the Inclusive Product Week team for organizing and running this successful event! The sessions are available for viewing on Youtube.
Diana Laster, CFSJ’s Director of Project Management, spoke on a panel at the Code for America Summit about the GetYourRefund project, a partnership with the IRS volunteer income tax assistance program that provided free tax help to low income families through a digital platform to help people get the tax credits they deserve, addressing a $10.5 billion access gap. She discussed what it was like to mobilize volunteers on GetYourRefund in 2020 at the start of the pandemic and how volunteer power played a huge role in being able to quickly scale the effort across the country.
Sarnai Gantumur and Federica Landini, Project Leads, co-presented a Research Status Report on the Bay Area News Collective project. They discussed recent progress including the planned qualitative research, the recruitment of target participants, conductance of interviews and data analysis and the next steps of finishing the data analysis and delivering the research report when the project wraps up.
Joey Richardson, CFSJ’s Director of Frontend Engineering and Project E-Immigrate Lead, demoed the project’s Citizenship & Immigration Information Tool website which enabled the Center for Employment Training-Immigration and Citizenship Program to streamline their process for helping people to apply for immigration and naturalization legal aid. He demonstrated how people would fill out the questionnaire that would determine the help needed and the ability to use the tool in 14 different languages. The tool has received over 700 responses so far.
🍁 Leadership Changes
We welcome our new teammate: Fabiola: Executive Assistant; Renee: Volunteer Coordinator; Shivani, Abha, Sundeep, Altynay, Yugma, Christina and Disha: Project Leads.
Open position: Director of Fundraising, Assistant Director of Backend Engineering, Assistant Director of Event Management are available.
Interested? Reach out to Annie on our Slack workspace.
🎉 Code for San José Project Highlights
- Project Open Disclosure landed the partnership with the San Jose Ethics Committee! The team will work on identifying the strategy for scaling the solution for all of California and recruitment needs.
- Project OpenStreetMap has 3,000 new entries to review and completed 15% of point of interest import, including 29% of high priority tasks.
- Project City Agenda Scraper has teams working on 2 new agenda scrapers and will have 4 scrapers in total when completed.
- Project Police Data Trust is ready to create the web app and have started gathering the team to create it.
All active projects are looking for volunteers. For more information and project updates, view our civic hack night slide deck.
🌏 Events
Code for San Jose Civic Hack Nights are on Thursdays from 6:30–9 pm. The next Code for San Jose Civic Hack Nights are:
🐰 That’s all, folks!
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Join us for our virtual meetups on June 10 and June 24!
To get in touch with us, email us at codeforsanjose@gmail.com, or find us on Slack. If you haven’t joined our Slack yet, go here.)
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Until next month, take care, and let’s keep up the good work!
Bri,
Code for San José Newsletter Producer
