June 2020: Black Lives Matter
Code for San José’s June 2020 newsletter
👋 Welcome
Dear Code for San José community,
We are deeply saddened and outraged by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless victims who have not received national recognition. We are witnessing police brutality and white supremacy across the nation. Our nation is no stranger to police brutality and white supremacy — it’s been alive with over 400 years history in the United States. We reflect on the criminal justice system and government systems that have enabled inequality and injustice in the United States. We stand with peaceful protesters. We hear Black voices saying, “Enough is enough. These systems were not built for us.” We believe our government should work for everyone, not just the privileged. It is on all of us to fix these government systems. To learn more about the Black Lives Matter movement and what you can do to learn and take action, read our statement here.
🏳️🌈 Happy Pride Month!
Every year during the month of June since 1970, Pride events have been held to commemorate the Stonewall Riots — the pivotal civilian uprising that sparked the LGBTQIA+ rights movement. Parades are flowing through cities, rainbow flags are plastered on every open surface, and love is flourishing. However, the marginalization of the LGBTQIA+ community is deeply ingrained in our history and the community continues to experience discrimination to this day. We have made significant progress over the past 50 years from the legalization of same-sex marriage to amplifying LGBTQIA+ voices, identities, and stories. Despite this progress, the work is far from done.
We are saddened and outraged by the recent deaths of Tony McDade, Riah Milton, and Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, all individuals of the Black Trans community. Black Trans lives are usually overlooked when it comes to working towards racial justice. Black Trans people are disproportionately subjected with violence and discrimination. For Black lives to matter, we must also honor Black Trans Lives Matter. An intersectional approach is salient to achieve this within our community and government systems. We will continue to work to embrace, honor, and embody our LGBTQIA+ community this month and beyond.
Resources
A Guide to Being an Ally to Transgender and Nonbinary Youth
The LGBTQ Youth Space in Silicon Valley
The Association for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Issues in Counseling
Black Trans Advocacy Coalition Mission
Santa Clara County has updated its Shelter-in-Place ordinance, effective June 5th. The new order allows certain businesses to reopen and additional activities are now permitted. However, residents are still encouraged to remain at home and to continue to practice social distancing. To see the updated ordinance, please go to the Santa Clara County Department of Public Health’s website.
🎉 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.
Have you taken the Census yet? Please help us spread the word about our informational website that we built for the City of San Jose to everyone you know.
On May 28th, we heard from Megan Fluke about Green Foothills’ work to protect our region’s open space, farmlands and natural resources. To learn more, view the slides: Introduction to Green Foothills.
On June 11th, Code for San Jose hosted a special hack night focused on Actions Towards Racial Justice. 29 participants attended to engage in discussion about racial equity, white supremacy, and ways to take action. To recap:
- We observed 8 minutes and 46 seconds of silence for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Dana Martin, and countless victims of racism, police brutality and transphobia.
- Co-Captain Yan-Yin Choy shared an enlightening presentation on the (brief) history of racism and injustice in the United States. View the presentation to learn more.
- Leadership Team Member Diane Labenz invited the Code for San Jose community to process their feelings during a post-it note activity. Many community members expressed feelings of anger, sadness, grief, exhaustion, and hope. The group convened to share actions we’re taking towards racial justice.
We’re continuing the conversation in the #racial-justice Slack channel. We invite you to share resources, current events, project ideas, and actions towards racial justice.
Upcoming Events in our Community
- People Power: Connecting Community to Government During COVID-19 (June 25, 2020 from 9:00 am — 10:00am PST). Co-Captain Yan-Yin Choy will be speaking on our efforts on COVID-19.
- Modernizing Congress: Bringing Government into the 21st Century (July 1, 2020 from 9:00am — 10:00 am PST).
📈 Project Updates
- San José Census 2020 is live on sjcensus.com. We are looking for a visual graphic designer to help us create fun new images to share via social media. We are also looking for a volunteer to help manage a virtual raffle to help drive participation. See this document for details, reach out Kate Valdes if you have any questions, or join the discussion on #census2020 in our Slack.
- Disaster Response — Public facing website displaying current disaster related information for anyone to view. Our next step is to continue web development work.
- Meal Tally — Through the Summer Meal Program (Summer Meal Service Sites — Food Programs (CA Dept of Education)) sponsors are able to deliver meals to families in need and tally the data in a small web application for ease of use and efficiency. Currently, no dev work is needed, however there might be need for training material for bringing on new sponsors that want to adopt Meal Tally for their tallying system.
- Heart of the Valley is an open source map of public art and murals in the South Bay. We fixed broken URLs and images. Check it on GitHub, live, or join the discussion on #heart-of-the-valley on Slack.
- Open Disclosure’s back end team is working to deduplicate data from amendments and other campaign finance documents. The front end team is working on making the web app working on mobile. The project can be accessed on Github and join us in the #open-disclosure channel on Slack.
- OpenStreetMap prototyped a SPARQL query that finds OSM features named after slave traders. This could eventually turn into a visual resource that would help people find streets, buildings, etc. that need to be renamed. Join us in our #osm channel on Slack.
- Code for San José website redesign is nearly complete! We are spicing up the Code of Conduct page by emphasizing key terms in blue and adding bright, numbered bullets. The redesign project can be accessed on Github on the 2020_redesign branch and join our channel #cfsj-website on Slack.
- VITA Tax help with Code for America. We joined Code for America’s GetYourRefund.org, to help people access the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). The EITC is one of the most effective anti-poverty programs in the country, but one in five eligible households wasn’t claiming it — and that was before the COVID-19 crisis arrived. Read more about how our volunteer lead Diana Laster has been collaborating with CFA to scale GetYourRefund.org. Want to help put cash into people’s pockets? Check out the Collaboration Call doc and get connected to the Code for America Slack (slack.codeforamerica.org) and #cfa-vita-folks channel.
- Find Free Food Near Me. Use our tool to find free meals or groceries near you in Santa Clara County. Check out the repository on GitHub. We also helped the City of San José improve accessibility, mobile responsiveness and user experience with the tool Find Free Food Near Me.
- 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. High priority tasks include building web scrapers to scrape Covid-19 data and news info from different county websites and front-end/UX/UI issues. To contribute, join #covid-19-response in the Code for San Jose slack channel, or view the issues on GitHub.
- Silicon Valley Strong Resident Assistant Chatbot. Our volunteers helped curate content and refine translations for the City of San Jose’s resident assistant chatbot, which is live on SiliconValleyStrong.org.
🐰 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 June 25 and July 9, which will also be a Map Night, with featured speaker and co-founder Michelle Thong. Michelle will speak on the intersection of volunteering and career paths in civic tech.
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.)
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
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
Erika Hudiono, Advisory Board Member
Darren Pham, Advisory Board Member
Sunny Mui, Advisory Board Member
