Meeting Notes

November Hack Night Meeting Notes

We had lots of guests presenting on projects last night!

PDX Shelter

Fresh from their victory at Portland Startup Weekend, the folks behind PDX Shelter came by and presented on their project. They shared the surprising statistic that "70% of homeless youth have access to smartphones." The project hopes to enable the homeless to find nearby shelter bed openings more easily.

Find out more about the PDX Shelter project at pdxshelters.firebaseapp.com.

Open Trail Data

Ryan and Jereme talked about the work they've been doing with the Intertwine in relation to the OpenTrails data specification. A lot of good things came out of the Trail Editor project they started with Dale and a couple of other volunteers at the National Day of Civic Hacking event we had back in June, including a lasting partnership with Oregon Metro. Their work has evolved into OuterSpatial, an OpenTrails platform to help agencies from all over the country publish trail data using the new spec developed with help from Alan Williams of Code for America and many other stakeholders. They also showed off OuterSpatial's Developer Hub which documents the OuterSpatial API and has loads of goodies.

Find out more about Open Trail Data at opentraildata.org.

OSM Portland Building Imports

Mele and Rafa talked about the OSM hackathon last Saturday and continued their work to get a letter drafted to the OSM imports committee to make sure the import process runs smoothly.

Come to a MaptimePDX event to learn more about OSM and mapping in general.

Fully Fund Oregon Schools

Alex from Collective Agency continued his research into the financial specifics necessary to fully fund Pre-K-12 education and end Oregon income taxes by taxing assets over $1.8 million with help with some volunteers.

Find out more about the constitutional amendment initiative here.

Thanks to everyone who made it out to the event! Our next hack night is at 6 PM on Wednesday, December 10, 2014. RSVP here.

If you think something's missing from the meeting notes or you have some extra links or resources you'd like to contribute, feel free to send us an email, file an issue, or open a pull request!

August Hack Night

Resources:

• Meeting Intro Slides
• US City Open Data Census
• Willow's talk: "Technology as a Means to Equality"
• Place a Vote

Summer Updates

Time can slip away very quickly during a beautiful Portland summer. Your organizers have been busy, though! Nate G. has been traveling around and speaking at conferences, Erica and Nate W. spoke on a panel for the Grantmakers of Oregon, and Erica also gave a talk at PDXTech4Good. What else is going on? Read our most recent organizer's meeting notes below to find out.

Want to help out with organizing? Just drop us a line on Twitter @codeforportland or on our Google group.

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Code for Portland Organizers Meeting Notes (8/4/2014)

1. Code of Conduct

There was an issue with someone being treated poorly at the last meeting. We've resolved to (a) follow up with a verbal warning, and (b) make sure to mention the Code of Conduct more explicitly at the beginning of every meeting. A Github issue was created for (b). We also agreed to make a point about asking people not to wander around the office by themselves because someone was doing that.

2. We've decided to switch our Code of Conduct over to a fork of the new Code for America code of conduct. See issue #14 for more info.

3. Municipal Partner

Preston mentioned he had a ticket available for CfA Summit (Sep 23-25) that we could offer to a city official which might lead to building a partnership with them. We talked about a few ideas for potential people to talk to and invite.

4. Defining a user need as part of project startup

We discussed how there haven't been many projects brought forward with a well-defined need, and how a dataset isn't really enough for a good starting point. Part of the conversation we had with James Keller of Walmart Labs was that there are a good number of UX people at her meetups that would be interested here. Nate W. is going to see if she can make it to our next meeting so we can start to have discussions about defining need as part of project launches.

5. CfA Brigade site template

Several attendees (primarily Ben R. and Daniel) mentioned wanting to be able to share information about their skills to be able to be more easily connected to projects. The proposed solution was a members page on the site. Nate G. proposed building a set of repos meant to be forkable and replicable for building and managing a brigade that would also work with Github pages (chief among them a members repo), inspired by http://jlord.github.io/forkngo/. He will build out some documentation for how this would work and what the conceptual model is. The idea is each repo would be self-contained and meant for creating and managing a process, like projects, members, events, all tied to a central *.github.io site. Spent a bit of time looking at sites for other brigades.

6. Some July Hack Night updates

• Ed Groth worked on an OTP Bike Trip Planner app for mobile that was started at the TriMet hackathon and asked about help with server costs for early-stage civic projects (see https://github.com/CodeForPortland/organizers/issues/16)
• PDX Trails App: Marc worked with Michael, talked about remaining tasks on the project, explained git and code structure.
• A group of civic hackers took a look at the CDC data on data.cdc.gov and came to the conclusion that the data was a little shallow (state level, not city or district level), so they ended up looking for health data elsewhere that they could visualize. They started coding and Matt Priour said he would try to follow up.
• Avenues for (Transportation) Advocacy - Lillian Karabaic stopped by looking for volunteers. She thinks it should be about 12 hours of work for 4 people, Saturday work, beer provided!
• The Hack Oregon crew continues to work hard on their projects.

7. August Hack Night

Next hack night is August 19th. Nate W. is checking with NORTH to see if they can host (and will know by August 5); otherwise ESRI is the fallback. We should have our Code of Conduct updated by then so we can launch at that event.

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Action Items

1. Follow up w/ Code of Conduct breach (Nate W)
2. Fork and revise CfA Code of Conduct (Mele)
3. Reach out to Fred Miller about financial data/CfA summit/partnership (Nate G)
4. Start documenting CfA brigade site template (Nate G)
5. Revise meeting format to help newcomers (ongoing)

Tales from the Frontier of Civic Hacking

Jason Denizac from Code for America is in town and has offered to stop by and tell us about some of his experiences as a Code for America fellow working with the city of Chattanooga in Tennessee. The slides from his talk are available.

Additional Notes

• End of May - national day of hacking. Community projects will come in and will look to partner up with programmers.
• Environmental Services nonprofit, that is looking to track environmental/waste data.
• open data has a supremely vital role: give more people access to the primary source information.
• civic user testing group_ a chicago-based initiative about, sort of, crowdsourcing QA work and paying people to do it - broadening the base of user testing. "If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work."

Links

• opendefinition.org
• government.github.com

First Hack Night

It took some time and organizing, but we finally had our first Code for Portland hack night! We gathered to hear some group updates and then broke out into small groups to work on or talk about upcoming project opportunities.

Don’t worry if you missed it, we meet every month. You can find out when our next meeting is.

Civic Heroes of all types welcome!

Code for Portland meetups are for coders and non-coders alike. As long as you're interested in making government more open and building interesting things for our city, you're more than welcome!

If you have something you'd like to work on or are excited about for the social and civic good, let us know via the meetup or at the hack night itself. We are growing our initiative and the energy comes from the community.

Want to get involved? Join the google group

Kick-Off Meeting

Wow! What a great first meeting of Code for Portland! There was so much energy and enthusiasm! Nate Goldman kicked things off with a presentation about Code for America and what a Portland Brigade can do for our community.

Everyone helped brainstorm ideas, projects, and areas of work they are passionate about. After the open brainstorm session, Chuck Lauer Vose facilitated a discussion to help narrow the ideas down to several categories we might explore doing projects in.

Categories for potential projects included open government, civic engagement, sustainability and project maintenance, environmental issues, transportation, community safety, education, social justice, and housing. Whew! We have a lot of things to run with!

After that, we broke into small groups to discuss these categories and find out what we can do as a group to begin finding projects that will have a real and meaningful impact in our community.

We wrapped up the day with some time spent socializing and connecting with each other. This is a community of truly wonderful people!

Want to get involved? join the google group

Chartering Code for Portland

This was one of the first meetings of Code for Portland. There was a lot of great discussion and exciting plans, but my favorite part is our group description in the strategic plan.

We are a bridge between tech, nonprofits, and government agencies. We promote civic hacking and engagement by organizing events, helping teams build projects, and providing an open, collaborative space. We are making our community more awesome.

Want to get involved? Join the google group