Learn, Support, Uplift
👋 Welcome
Hello civic tech friends,
Check out our recap of March activities including a presentation by the Presidential fellows, project updates and resources for Women’s History Month.
Statement about the Atlanta Shootings
We are deeply saddened and outraged that the hate crimes against Asian Americans have continued and culminated in the deaths of 7 Asian American people, 6 of whom were Asian American women, in Atlanta.
We continue to affirm our support for everyone of Asian descent in the Code for San Jose community, the local Asian American neighborhoods in the Bay Area and beyond. We stand in solidarity with the Asian American community.
Our February newsletter has educational resources and we have included more here. Learn about the experiences of Asians in America, especially Asian American women. Support local Asian businesses. Continue to fight for an anti-racist world. If you see racism, speak out.
Resources:
Support the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum
Anti-Racism Daily’s newsletters, Stop the “Lone Wolf” Narrative and Reject Racial Fetishization
Women’s History Month
March is Women’s History Month which celebrates women’s contributions to culture, history and society. Women have made an impact in many industries including science, technology, business, arts and culture, and politics. Despite this, women have not achieved gender equality and continue to face many challenges. The pandemic has increased the barriers that women have faced for generations.
The fight for gender equality is not over. Honor the accomplished and trailblazing women for paving the way for future generations of women and girls.
Resources:
History of Women’s Rights in America
National Women’s History Museum’s exhibit First But Not the Last: Women Who Ran for President
COVID-19 Vaccine
COVID-19 vaccine is available to individuals over 65 in Santa Clara County. Please check their website for more information about eligibility and how to schedule an appointment. Remember to stay home, wear a mask, wash your hands and be 6 feet apart.
✏️ Code for San Jose Updates
Marisa Levine from the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows gave a presentation on the program. The Presidential Innovation Fellows program connects technologists and innovators with federal government departments to create products and services that benefit the public. Johnny Martin, a recent Presidential Innovation Fellow, shared his experience serving his country as a Fellow and encouraged everyone to apply. Learn more about the program and the application process on their website. The deadline to submit is May 14, 2021.
Ellina Yin from Only in San José presented on SJ Constitutional Convention ’21, a bi-weekly civics masterclass that explains how local government works and how to participate specifically right now with the City Charter Review Commission (CRC). The City of San José’s CRC is studying the City Charter (City Constitution) to understand whether our San José’s governance structure is appropriately suited to meet the complex needs of a contemporary San José Community.
Gerardo Capiel and Bion Johnson from Google.org pitched the project Civiform. CiviForm is an application tool that empowers applicants (and their trusted intermediaries) to more easily access and apply to essential benefit services by allowing folks to reuse data across benefit application forms.The project is being piloted in Seattle with the hope of bringing it to other cities including San Jose! Code for San Jose volunteers would help develop and design the tool.
Joey and Sunny created and demoed an accessibility checklist for developers. The accessibility checklist will help developers ensure that anyone, regardless of physical or mental disabilities, can use an application.
Anthony Chen and Charlie Hoffs from unBox’s BayAreaCommunity.org, Minh Nguyen from OpenStreetMap, and Hattie Chau and Evan Suarez from Design Audits for Healthcare.gov presented their projects at the World Information Architecture Day conference at the San Jose State University King Library.
🍁 Leadership Changes
We welcome our new teammates: Patrick: Director of Recruitment, Grace: Director of Event Management, Jovana: Assistant Director of Marketing, Sulakshana and Jiji: Project Leads.
Paris is now Executive Assistant and Hattie and Carolina are now Assistant Directors of Design.
Open position: Director of Fundraising, Assistant Director of Member Engagement, Assistant Director of Recruitment and Assistant Director of Backend Engineering. Interested? Reach out to Annie on our Slack workspace.
🎉 Code for San José Project Highlights
- Project Silicon Valley Strong demoed their design audit to the San Jose Mayor’s Office. The design audit was well received and the team will help the Mayor’s Office complete a redesign of their website. Great work everyone!
- Project City Agenda Scraper has a working Legistrar scraper which will extract and analyze topics, keywords and items from city agendas. Congratulations on reaching this major milestone!
- Project Code for San Jose completed mobile wireframes, started creating hifi mockups and are putting together a style guide and design system.
- Project E-Immigrate completed questionnaire upload by excel and submitting a questionnaire response to database.
All active projects are looking for volunteers. For more information and project updates, view our civic hack night slide deck.
🌏 Events
The Code for America Summit is May 12–13, 2021. Click here for more information.
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!
Join us for our virtual meetups on April 1 and April 15!
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!
Bri,
Code for San José Newsletter Producer
