tecznotes

Today, we wrapped up a bunch of fake cities from the goofy tail end of our Code for America site redesign process into a 2015 cities April Fools joke.

Today, everyone on the tech team dressed up as me, right down to the yellow DURR.

Today, Frances and I merged streams and made progress on a proof-of-concept we’ve been thinking about for the Digital Front Door project. Lane wrote that linked post.

Today, I participated on a panel hosted by Zipfian Academy on Data Science For Social Good, with folks who work in education, power, petitions, and health. These are my notes:

Code for America works at the source of data: cities, governments, and the primary source data they produce.

Governments are famously behind on technology, while Silicon Valley is famously out front. So, the biggest technical challenge we face is the bridging the trough of disillusionment rollercoaster ride of the Gartner Hype Cycle.

We try to build that bridge by working on things that matter to cities, like public records, public services, and communications.

At the same time, we are building and supporting an international community of civic hackers, through projects like the Brigade and a new API for collecting and hosting information about civic tech projects.

Right now, one of the emergent data science issues we see is ETL or Extract/Transform/Load. At our weekly Open Oakland Brigade hack night, people like former fellow Dave Guarino are helping city staff publish ethics commission data.

Come to Open Oakland meeting every Tuesday, 6:30pm at city hall to participate. Search Google “ETL for America” to learn more.

If you live in SF, come to SF Brigade meeting every Wednesday, 6:30pm at Code for America 9th & Natoma.

All in all a good day.