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