Code for San José Newsletter — February 2020
Our monthly newsletter is one of the ways we share updates, resources, and opportunities with the wider civic tech community.
👋 Welcome
Hello Code for San José friends, and welcome to our February newsletter! Below find organizational updates, project updates, and opportunities within the civic tech realm.
🎉 Code for San José Updates
- We began this new decade with 10 active projects, all created by our Code for San José volunteers!
- Learn all about Code for America’s EITC Workshop and how you can get involved. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a flexible cash benefit claimed through filing your taxes. Let us know if you have any ideas on how we can help San José residents access this program!
- It’s election time for Code for America National Advisory Council (NAC). You can learn more about the candidates, attend the online candidate forum, and vote online by February 13, 2020.
📈 Project Updates
Census 2020 is live — view it here! To learn more about the open source project, view the repository on GitHub.
Disaster Response is a live project with more features to come. We applied for the City Innovate Challenge. View the repository on GitHub.
Meal Tally is a live project used by seven libraries in the City of San José to track free meals given to the community, especially youth. View on GitHub and reach out to @joester on Slack if you know any libraries that might want to adopt this process!
SCC Probation completed website mockup. Now we are working on migrating content to a Gatsby site
Heart of the Valley team recently added an editor to maintain our database and our main site is currently migrating to the React-based Gatsby framework. View the map of public art | repository on GitHub.
Renters Rights archived the original UI, which now directs visitors to the City of San Jose Housing Department website. We began collaborating with students from Stanford Legal Design Lab on usability testing for tools to help triage questions from tenants. Learn more on our slack channel #renters_rights.
Open Disclosure created a basic website UI, posted data visualizations, and started to incorporate campaign finance data for the March 2020 election. We need help with data pipelines, backend development, data visualizations, and front end UI updates for our Gatsby website. Links: GitHub | Slack channel #open-disclosure.
OpenStreetMap made progress with the San José building import, which is 37% complete, with most of North San José and the Silver Creek/Evergreen areas now imported. Interested in data entry and maps? Join us on slack channel #osm to learn how to get started.
Code for San José website design phase is almost complete! Next steps is to code the new website design. Find it on GitHub. and at codeforsanjose.com
Dashboard — Erika Hudiono created a dashboard with a countdown to help us track time during our meetups. Check it out on GitHub
Catalyze SV map — Joey Richardson and Sunny Mui from the Catalyze SV map team attended the Cory Neighborhood Association General Meeting. At the meeting, Kirk Vartan presented our map project with Catalyze SV. You can watch the presentation (starting at 34:10).
🌟 Opportunities
Events
- [Feb 13] Write/Speak/Code: Speak Your Talk!
- [Feb 20] Code for San José — Civic Hack Night
- [Feb 24] 2020 Census: Trust and Safety Workshop
- [Feb 26] Code for San José volunteers will be speaking on the SJSU STEM & Social Justice Panel at San José State University
- [March 2] Code for America Monthly Workshop
- [March 5] Code for San José — Civic Hack Night featuring Catalyze SV
- [March 7] Accessibility Camp (a one-day free conference on accessibility)
- [March 11–13] Code for America Summit
Jobs
- San Francisco Digital Services is hiring Visual Designer, Senior UX Designer, Senior Product Strategist, and Drupal Engineer
- CoProcure is hiring a full stack web developer and other engineering roles
- Aspen Tech Policy Hub Fellowship is accepting applications until February 13, 2020
- Public Interest Tech Job Board by Code for America
Boards & Commissions
- Vacancies on San Jose Boards and Commissions
- Vacancies on Santa Clara County Boards and Commissions. Also, see Notices of Unscheduled Vacancy Report to identify current openings
📚Reading List
- To the women of civic tech by Grace O’Hara
- Redesigning the Razing the Bar website by Namrata Challa
- Postcard from California by Stacey Phillips
- The year in review for Code for America by Jennifer Pahlka
- Digital is Not Always Better Than Paper by Jennifer Pahlka
- Rethinking Procurement: A Guide to Strategic and Collaborative Public Sector Purchasing by Brian Alexander
- How Privilege Defines Performance by Tatiana Mac. View video and slides
- Case Study: Implementing Accessible Data Charts for the Khan Academy 2018 Annual Report by Sara Soueidan
- Writing Automated Tests for Accessibility by Marcy Sutton
- Creating UX Design Personas Webinar by Denis Boudreau and Caitlin Geier
- Webinar: How Persons with Disabilities Use the Web
🙌 Gratitude
Thank you to our outgoing leadership team members for your service to Code for San José: Clarence Leung, Hassan Schroeder, Helen Skinner, Jason Gardner, Julie Kim, Kyle Falconer, Sanaz Jamloo, and Vivek Bansal.
Welcome new leadership team member: Dane Olsen!
Thank you to Jennifer Pahlka for your decade of service founding and building Code for America. You can read more about this in her blog Changing Roles in Code for America’s Leadership. Lou Moore and Zeryn Sarpangal are the interim co-CEOs for Code for America.
Thank you to our community partners Alex Shoor (Catalyze SV) and Vilcia Rodriguez (City of San Jose — Census 2020). We enjoy collaborating to make a meaningful impact in our community.
We are so grateful for recent in-kind and small donations
Thank you Alex Shoor and Catalyze SV for your in-kind donation of pizza for our first hack night of the year! Thank you Spencer Alves and Yan-Yin Choy for your donation to Code for San Jose. Small donations and in-kind donations help us continue to operate our 100% volunteer-run and volunteer brigade.
Shoutout to our volunteers for your dedication: Helen Skinner, Anathea Lolen, Turner Hayes, Cesar Arellano, Ian Hunter, Holy Shipley, Diane Labenz, Kate Valdes, Julie Kim, Alessandro Pianetta, Spencer Alves, Betsy Megas, Mark N, Sunny Mui, John Lau, and Gabriel Atineza
🐰 That’s all, folks!
If you’re hungry for more, here’s how you can find out what Code for San José is working on and get involved:
Come to our upcoming meetings: February 20 and March 5 at ActionSpot, a local co-working studio and startup incubator in downtown San Jose.
To get in touch with us, email us at codeforsanjose@gmail.com, or find us on Slack (@Yan-Yin Choy, @Annie Steenson, @Joseph Richardson; if you haven’t joined our Slack yet, go here.
If there’s someone from your organization who’s not getting these updates, but should be, send them this link to subscribe to our newsletter.
Until next month — let’s keep up the good work!
Team Code for San José
Yan-Yin Choy, Captain
Joseph Richardson, Captain
Annie Steenson, Captain
Erika Hudiono, Leadership Team Member
Minh Nguyen, Leadership Team Member
Dane Olsen, Leadership Team Member
Lena Tran, Leadership Team Member
Lorin Camargo, Advisory Board Member
Michelle Thong, Advisory Board Member
Namrata Challa, Advisory Board Member
Emily Ramos, Advisory Board Member
