Code for America Fellowship Staff

Hi all, haven't posted in a while - we're excited because the codeforamerica Summit is finally here, and we're excited to see the Code for America fellows showcase their work alongside community members, governments, and companies working in the civic tech space. 

You can check out more information here --> http://www.codeforamerica.org/summit/

codeforamerica is getting ready for Pride Month!

At Code for America we have an opportunity to help both ourselves and others stop reinventing the wheel around best practices in building and running programming like our Code for America Fellowship.

Like any startup organization or nonprofit, challenges exist in documenting stories, case studies, and process documents - not just in a way that’s easily accessible for future members of the organization, but also partners so that they may draw upon our lessons learned and remix best practices in their own work.

At Code for America, we not only partner with local government in the US, but with nascent international groups interested in starting civic tech “Code for ___” organizations in their own countries, as well as with established civic tech endeavors in other countries. These organizations are separate from Code for America but are treated as sister organizations, independent but part of a collaborative network we call Code for All. We teach and learn from each other and make sure all of our work is better because we are connected.

We've begun conceptualizing the resource that would be helpful to the network as a "toolkit," documenting not only stories, but the process and templates by which others can model and/or riff off of for their own purposes. Such a toolkit is often the basis for those members of a network to share back their learnings, and improve the understanding of the overall work. 

-An early prototype of a logo for our toolkit

Code for America International Program Manager Lynn Fine and I have been working on such a resource for the past few weeks with the intention of:

answering and meeting international partner's greatest needs around replicating our Code for America fellowship program. 

providing an action playbook, from the strategic to tactical level, on how to manage the fellowship program, complete with templates for action.

helping ourselves document our own practices. 

Sharing our work in an open source way. 

cc @micksussman RT @cydharrell: what @alexstran does during staff meetings @codeforamerica pic.twitter.com/0qqVrZK8DV

- Neo's Peter Shanley and crew stopped by to connect around mentoring fellows. 

Hey folks, alexandertran here, I just wanted to log here for folks a quick update about fellowship staff has been working on. Yesterday I shared a bit about the calendar coming up, but this is a nice way also just to log what's going on. 

Mini Summit Proposals!

Fellows and then everyone else will have a chance to summit proposals for our mini-Summit (which our awesome design committee kavi-h, David Leonard, mollyampersand, & more are working on creating great logos/stickers/other collateral for).

Tech Team Help

This is usually a time when fellows are working hard to get their prototypes into a place that they can really show, and that have a bit more polish. Since this year we're having a "mini-Summit" event, there's a nice forcing function to push that forward. To that end, we've been working with tech team to provide more tech-side support and guidance. If you don't have one already, you'll have a person in addition to Erica (or replacing Erica - we love you Erica!) supporting you on the tech side. 

We'll also be rallying more industry mentors to Code for America for fellowship support as we get into the second half of the program. 

Recruitment!

Hi folks, alexandertran here. I wanted to give a heads up to everyone about what CfA Fellowship staff is up to. Plus look at this puppy!

Things we're working on: 

Right now we're gearing up to host a Mini-Summit for all fellows/staff/startups for June 19th. Eventbrite and ways to participate coming soon!

In concert with that, we're putting together a "Program Forward" meeting to make sure people are kept in the know about upcoming programing. 

We're talking with a lot of major foundations to talk about partnerships both in CA and beyond. 

We're going to lean into recruiting very soon - the application for the fellowship opens in June! We'll coordinate with Brigade on National Day of Civic Hacking to help push fellowship recruitment. 

We'll be taking a break from Crosshack during National Day of Civic Hacking, but it will come back into play at the end of June!

Quick project update from CfA Staff! Its beautiful back at HQ.

Nicole and Alex are back from their trips. His last week back, Alex has been working on:

2015 city applications calls and discussions, configuring our application software

going to the awesome Civic Design Camp organized by Cyd, fellows, and our friends at SFMOCI. Check out some notes here. Molly and Ainsley did a great workshop called "Fantastic Flyers."

working on bringing new mentors, especially centered around dev needs, pitching, and government content mentors.

starting to form the mini-Summit