Charlotte Selected as a 2019 Code for America Community Fellowship City

We’re excited to announce that Charlotte has been selected as a fellowship city as part of Code for America’s 2019 Community Fellowship Program! The community fellowship, an annual program founded in 2018, empowers cities to develop solutions to complex problems by partnering citizens, referred to as “fellows,” with local government agencies.

Charlotte was one of seven cities selected from a pool of thirty applicants and will be working with two part-time fellows from Open Charlotte Brigade; Jeffery Carmichael as well as Open Charlotte Brigade’s captain, Jill Bjers. The two fellows will be working in the field of criminal justice and we look forward to bringing you more information about their project as it becomes available. To get started, Jeffery and Jill attended a multi-day on-boarding program earlier this month with the other fifteen nationwide fellows at Code for America’s headquarters in San Francisco.

This is the second time Charlotte has been selected as a fellowship city. In 2014, through the original fellowship program, the City of Charlotte worked with Code for America to bring two fellows into Charlotte City government. The goal was to show how technology and open data could shape the government for the better. From that fellowship came CityGram, an application that lets residents subscribe to real-time notifications from their city and has since been deployed in more than fifteen cities nationwide.

We’re grateful for Code for America’s continuing belief that Open Charlotte Brigade and the City of Charlotte can greatly improve lives by creating and supporting new opportunities for citizens and government work together.

Look forward to hearing more from us soon about this exciting new venture!