A screenshot of Code for San José Virtual Civic Hack Night held on May 14, 2020

Code for San José Newsletter — May 2020

Our monthly newsletter is one of the ways we share updates, resources, and opportunities with the wider civic tech community.

👋 Welcome

Hello civic tech friends! Welcome to our May 2020 Newsletter. Mask your face, not your heart. Despite the uncertain times, we hope you stay safe and healthy, and find ways to connect with your community and take breaks from screens. Have compassion for yourself, and community — we are in this together.

We are saddened by the passing of Courtney Brousseau, founder of Code for America brigade Code for Berkeley, Civic Digital Fellow with Coding it Forward, transit advocate, alumnus of UC Berkeley, and a young, kind and well-loved community leader. Since September of last year, Courtney has worked at Twitter. Shylie Ati and Sebastian Cahill write in The Daily Californian: “Brousseau was a well-known advocate for public transportation and affordability. In addition to his other work, he co-founded Gay for Transit San Francisco, a monthly meetup for LGBTQ+ community members who are passionate about public transport, with BART Board of Directors representative Janice Li.” Our hearts go out to all who knew Courtney Brousseau and the community he deeply impacted and leaves behind.

The County Shelter-in-Place Order remains in effect through May 31st but certain restrictions have been eased. To see the updated guidelines in the County Shelter-in-Place Order, please go to the Santa Clara County Department of Public Health’s website. While the State of California announced on May 7, 2020 that it is relaxing certain state restrictions, Santa Clara County residents must comply with the stricter of the two orders.

🎉 Code for San José Updates

• In our efforts to continue social distancing, Code for San José will continue meeting and collaborating virtually for our hack nights until further notice.
• We are thrilled to welcome three (!!) new members to the Code for San José Leadership team: Kate Valdes, Darren Pham, and Sunny Mui!
• Have you taken the Census yet? Only 68.3% of Santa Clara County and 67.1% of San Jose has responded to the Census. Please help us spread the word about our informational website that we built for the City of San Jose to everyone you know. The deadline has been extended to mid-August so let’s get everyone counted!

Here are a few graphics we made to help spread the word on social media:

We’re excited for our new partnerships across Brigades and with our community:

• We began collaborating with Code for San Francisco and Open Oakland on Bay Area Panda, where you can find COVID-19 data dashboards for Bay Area counties, and FAQ related to COVID-19.
• We also helped the City of San José improve accessibility, mobile responsiveness and user experience with the tool Find Free Food Near Me, which you can view on SiliconValleyStrong.org.
• Additionally, our volunteers helped curate content for the City of San Jose’s resident assistant chatbot, which is now live on SiliconValleyStrong.org. To learn more about our projects, see the below Project Updates section.

In other news:

• On April 30th, we heard from our civic hack night guest speaker, Adam Sgrenci, founder and executive director of Center for Infrastructure & Society, which focuses on large-scale housing projects with regenerative processes to uplift communities, economies and ecosystems.

Code for San José brigade Co-Captain Yan-Yin Choy reveals her virtual background as a positive affirmation: “You are doing the best you can, and that is enough”, during the May 6th leadership meeting (artwork by YallaRoza)

📈 Project Updates

• VITA Tax help with Code for America have partnered together to address the difficulty of filing correctly to get the maximum benefit for Americans, GetYourRefund.org: Free tax help from IRS-certified volunteers. We are looking for volunteers with writing, editing, UX design, and customer support skills. View our Slack channel #cfa-vita-folks to find the pinned document with latest ways to contribute.
• San José Census 2020 is now live on SJCensus.com! We helped the City of San José build this informational website to help address FAQ and encourage residents to respond. We’re looking for volunteers with social media and design skills. Join our slack channel #census2020. View it on GitHub.
• Bay Area Brigades Pandemic Data Dashboard (Bay Area Panda) — built in collaboration with Code for San Francisco and Open Oakland, this website provides information related to COVID-19 and data dashboards from the Bay Area counties. We need volunteers to help build web scrapers to scrape data from county websites, and to research and write content for FAQ. To contribute, join #covid-19-response in the Code for San Jose slack channel, or view the issues on GitHub.
• Meal Tally is a live project currently used by 7 libraries in the city of San José to track free meals given to the community, especially youth. View the repository on GitHub and reach out to @joester on Slack if you know of any libraries that might want to adopt this process! Next steps is to scale to other sponsors and reaching out to other sponsors who would be interested in using Meal Tally. The Meal Tally program is currently suspended due to COVID-19 but are still in talks for opening a county wide program but no timeline in mind.
• Heart of the Valley is an interactive map powered by MapBox for viewing public artwork and murals in the Bay Area. View the map. Check out the issues on GitHub.
• Open Disclosure has launched a basic UI and posted several prototype data visualizations. We are beginning to incorporate the new campaign finance data for the March 2020 election. We need help with data pipelines, backend development, and data visualizations for our Gatsby website. See issues on GitHub and join us on Slack channel #open-disclosure.
• OpenStreetMap made progress with the San José building import, which is 54% complete, with most of North San José and the Silver Creek/Evergreen areas now imported. In addition, OSM has resolved 68% of road name mismatches between municipal and OSM data. Join us on #osm on Code for San Jose Slack to learn how to get started.
• Find Free Food Near Me — The City of San José approached us about helping with their Santa Clara County Free Food Finder tool for county residents during the COVID-19 pandemic. We were able to make just-in-time updates for their pitch meeting with the Mayor, as well as recode the front end from scratch for optimization and accessibility. You can check out the tool on SiliconValleyStrong.org, and see the code on GitHub.
• Silicon Valley Strong — We helped the City of San José curate content for the Resident Assistance chatbot, which is now live on siliconvalleystrong.org. Our volunteers are now helping with refining translations.
• Code for San José website is in the home stretch! We are polishing all our border-radii and accenting the “é” in “San José”. The redesign project can be accessed on GitHub on the 2020_redesign branch.
• Renters Rights is collaborating with students from Stanford Legal Design Lab on a SMS tool to improve legal hotlines. After conducting usability testing, we will make updates to the tool based on user feedback. To learn more, read this blog by our Juan Martinez Layuno, and join our channel #renters_rights on our slack.
• Disaster Response is a public facing website for broadcasting emergency disasters active in the San Jose region. It is a live project with more features to come. We have applied to the City Innovate Challenge and are getting started on the work from the challenge. View the repository on GitHub for most up to date issues to contribute to.

🐰 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:

We will meet virtually for our upcoming civic hack night on May 28.

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, take care, and 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

Diane Labenz, Leadership Team Member

Cesar Arellano, Leadership Team Member

Kate Valdes, Leadership Team Member

Lorin Camargo, Advisory Board Member

Michelle Thong, Advisory Board Member

Namrata Challa, Advisory Board Member

Emily Ramos, Advisory Board Member

Darren Pham, Advisory Board Member

Sunny Mui, Advisory Board Member