CodeMontage Blog

tl:dr; CodeMontage is wrapping up operations, but codemontage.com will remain online and open source.

CodeMontage has brought us incalculable inspiration, social impact, and learning. In three years of operation, we empowered thousands of individuals, supported over one hundred meaningful open source projects, and worked with dozens of technology companies big and small. We ran successful in-person events in half a dozen cities across the US. We engaged a diverse community of coders of all genders and from varied racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. We built a platform that connects coders and projects all around the world. We all got to be superheroes.

We also ran a number of experiments and explored a variety of business models. What we didn't quite find was a model we felt great about scaling to millions. So, we've decided to freeze this version of CodeMontage. Going forward, we will no longer actively recruit and mentor individuals through projects, actively advise project partners, or produce events. The current platform will remain online and open source for the foreseeable future.

Our biggest goals have been to inspire people and to leave things a little better than we found them. We believe we’ve done that, and we hope to do even better in the future. We've spent the last several months sharing lessons learned with community organizers, technology hiring managers, and non-profit project leaders. We hope to publish many of those lessons over time, too. Individually, we're each pursuing other projects that allow us to learn and grow:

Bethany is bringing socially driven businesses online with B. Martin Studio

Courteney is making electronic books more accessible at LibrarySimplified

Elaine is building the Colorado innovation community with LadyCoders Productions

Julia is improving technology for the US government at 18F

Nathan is building great tools for educators at Teachers Pay Teachers

Stephanie is expanding her marketing knowledge with OMD Worldwide

Theresa is improving an online learning platform at IIN

Vanessa is building continuous learning into engineering operations at Etsy

We hope you'll all keep moving social impact technology forward, too. Please check out our resources page to find great more organizations and more opportunities. We'll see you out there in the arena.

Sincerely,

Coders in Dallas gathered last weekend to enjoy a day of coding for social good, giving back to the open source community, and connecting with each other at the University of Texas Dallas.

After an introduction to the day from CodeMontage CEO Vanessa Hurst, who discussed the nature of effective progress, participants got a peek into the wisdom of MaryAnne Faschan, the Vice President of Americas Applications Services at HP. She shared her most difficult career challenges and her greatest successes, sharing a number of important pieces of wisdom she has gained along the way. MaryAnne mapped out the crucial aspects to a leadership path in technology, including honing the skills of your craft, using lateral career moves to broaden your knowledge, and accepting stretch challenges in order to grow.

“Every time I asked to be put in over my head - and I hope you do the same - my senior team gave me the scuba gear I needed and let me go.” -- MaryAnne Faschan

Inspired by MaryAnne, developers from local universities and businesses jumped into the work of learning and coding. Supporting causes from middle-school education to disaster relief to tech accessibility, participants took the time to set up their computers and begin fixing technical problems and proposing changes.

A particularly large group of Coder Day attendees were driven to propose UX adjustments, helping improve the user experience and making apps that were easier for their audience to understand and use effectively. Many other developers created new features or fixed existing bugs, connecting directly with project maintainers using the CodeMontage community. Throughout the afternoon, participants were focused on their goals, working through the challenges to make change happen.

At the end of the day, the coders gathered to share their learning, acknowledge their accomplishments, and thank others who had helped them throughout the event. With a break to deliberate, HP awarded generous prizes to developers based on their contributions and their demonstrations of persistence and collaboration throughout the day.

Mr. Tippens was an inspiring start to the day, and he even granted some attendees a quick selfie before encouraging us all to continue the conversation online.

But right at that moment there was less talking, more coding! Developers worked to configure their computers for the open source project of their choosing. Seated around the assigned table for their project, groups were working together with professionals and project leads to debug errors and share their learning through code contributions. Excitement was high, and the energy attendees were putting in was palpable.

While participants worked through lunch to push each codebase forward, ad-hoc lessons on new technologies and methods were emerging all around the room.

At the end of the day, coders stood together to share big wins and small ones. Some notable achievments included:

Submitting a first pull request

Learning how to use git and GitHub for the first time

Supporting other coders towards their own breakthroughs

Adjusting broken documentation details for a project

Using the syntax for a new programming language

Working as a team to debug errors

Discovering ways to contribute even with limited programming experience

...Not to mention the 25+ contributions to the projects themselves!

The day ended with ten developers receiving prizes and recognition for their work. Congratulations to all our winners, and thank you to everyone who attended. We can’t wait to see you next time!

Houston, here we come! 

CodeMontage had an absolute blast at the HP Coder Day of Service Fort Collins! On January 31st, over sixty coders gathered to have an impact on a wide range of social good, open source projects.

To kick things off, CodeMontage Founder Vanessa Hurst reminded attendees that even small steps and accomplishments move us toward a vision of a better world. HP R&D Section Manager Carol Lang gave an inspiring keynote about the prominent place of women in computer science past - and hopefully future.

Then attendees went at it! Coders forked projects like Ushahidi, Girl Develop It, OpenTreeMap, and the Open Science Framework. They spent hours battling install errors, coding away at the projects they found most interesting, and forming ad hoc groups of both students and professionals to learn together and create an impact.

And what an impact! Over the course of 8 hours, participants created 32 new issues to help projects identify bugs they weren’t aware of and make suggestions for the design and new features. Coders also submitted 34 pull requests to nine different projects. They documented installation details, fixed bugs, added enhancements, and kicked off new features.

During the closing round-up, we celebrated accomplishments big and small. Participants shared their biggest challenge, something they learned, and a person in the crowd who helped them during the day. Some people had fought to nail down the git workflow, while others worked to understand new programming languages or discovered ways to make projects easier to understand for the devs who came behind them. In the end, 8 coders were recognized by HP for their persistence, problem-solving abilities, and collaborative focus.

CodeMontage had an absolute blast at the HP Coder Day of Service Fort Collins! On January 31st, over 60 coders gathered at Colorado State University to have an impact on a wide range of social good, open source projects.

To kick things off, CodeMontage Founder Vanessa Hurst reminded attendees that even small steps and accomplishments move us toward a vision of a better world. HP R&D Section Manager Carol Lang gave an inspiring keynote about the prominent place of women in computer science past - and hopefully future.

Then attendees got down to business! Coders worked on projects like Ushahidi, Girl Develop It, OpenTreeMap, and the Open Science Framework. They spent hours battling install errors, coding away at the projects they found most interesting, and forming ad hoc groups of both students and professionals to learn together and create an impact.

And what an impact! Over the course of eight hours, participants created 32 new issues to help projects identify bugs they weren't aware of and make suggestions for the design and new features. Coders also submitted 34 pull requests to nine different projects. They documented installation details, fixed bugs, added enhancements, and kicked off new features.

During the closing round-up, we celebrated accomplishments big and small. Participants shared their biggest challenge, something they learned, and a person in the crowd who helped them during the day. Some people had fought to nail down the git workflow, while others worked to understand new programming languages or discovered ways to make projects easier to understand for the devs who came behind them. In the end, eight coders were recognized by HP for their persistence, problem-solving abilities, and collaborative focus.

As promised, we're bringing Coder Days of Service on the road in 2015 and our first stop will be January 31, 2015 in Fort Collins, Colorado. We'll be collaborating with students from Colorado State University and other great schools across Colorado, awesome professionals from HP and local startups, and community members from groups like Girl Develop It and Code for America! Hope to see you there.

In January 2014, CodeMontage created the Coder Day of Service to answer Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call to serve. We wanted to show a diverse group of people can change the world in just one day, and we did. More than 200 coders joined and together we contributed over 1200 hours and amplified over 50 nonprofit technology projects.

We're thrilled to announce that this year the Coder Day of Service is hitting the road with the talented folks from Hewlett-Packard -- we'll be running events in Fort Collins, Colorado, Dallas, Texas, Houston, Texas, and the San Francisco Bay Area. We'll announce key dates and locations soon, and of course feature inspiring open source projects here on our blog as the details unfold. We hope you’ll join us!

MIT Media Lab is leading the way for innovation in maternal health, and you, dear coder, can make a difference. Tickets are all sold out for the September 20-21, 2014 hackathon, but you can contribute from anywhere in the world by helping the team analyze and visualize user-submitted ideas. Email the team at [email protected] to volunteer your data visualization or NLP skills for Moms.

The organizers say, “We’ll send you the data set of amazing, creative ideas submitted by pump users. We’d love some innovative visualizations and ways to group and categorize the unstructured text. We can print out your work to be shown at the hackathon if it helps give insight into the user perspective.”

Busy this weekend? The MIT “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck” crew invites you to get in touch afterward: coders can change the world by sustaining this momentum of innovation in maternal health.

On Tuesday, June 24, Amplify and CodeMontage will host an evening of women coders coming together to contribute to open source, nonprofit education projects. We’ll focus on projects like Cofactor, a Ruby on Rails and GitHub-based tool for collaboratively developing interactive education, and Quill, an interactive grammar education tool.

Schedule

Pre-Event: RSVP and complete your profile on CodeMontage

By registering, you’ll receive project environment setup instructions beforehand so you can focus on coding and collaboration at the event.

6:00 pm: Doors Open for Dinner & Networking

6:30 pm: Welcome & Amplify Demo

Meet members of the Amplify team and see a demo of Amplify Tablet, the software and hardware revolutionizing K12 education.

6:45 pm: Break into Project Teams

Group leaders will explain the needs of each project, and we’ll help you find your group or select a project if you haven’t already selected one.

7:00 pm: Coding Begins

Get to know Amplify team members and fellow women coders as you help build educational tools and expand your open source portfolio.  

10:00 pm: Wrap Up & Review Progress

Post-Event:

On May 31st CodeMontage, in partnership with REDI Global Technologies, will host a National Day of Civic Hacking event in New York City. REDI and CodeMontage will gather 50 members of the NYC community who want to improve collaboration between citizens using open source technologies.

During the event, the CodeMontage platform will feature open source projects that enable citizens to share information, access community resources, and live better lives. We want to welcome coders, designers, activists, entrepreneurs, and anyone passionate to collaboratively build open technology to improve our communities. Register here.

National Day of Civic Hacking is an international event that will take place May 31 – June 1, 2014, in cities around the world. The event will bring together citizens, software developers, and entrepreneurs together to collaboratively create, build, and invent new solutions using publicly-released data, code and technology to improve our communities and the governments that serve them. Anyone can participate; you don’t have to be an expert in technology, you just have to care about your neighborhood and community.

NYC Details: Where:  REDI Global Technologies 80 Pine Street 27th Floor New York, NY 10005

Time: 9:30 am to 7:00 pm

Food: Breakfast, Lunch and Snacks will be served.

Schedule: 9:30 am Doors open 10:00 am Opening Keynote 10:30 am Featured Project Pitches 11:00 am -- Coding -- 12:30 pm Lunch served (grab & code) 3:30 pm Snacks served (grab & code) 6:00 pm Progress Demos 7:00 pm Wrap Up (recommended: grab dinner with new civic hacking friends)