In light of the current administration’s executive orders adversely impacting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer/Questioning (LGBTQ+) rights; Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) programs; immigrant communities; and the Federal workforce, the Alliance of Civic Technologists and Technologists for Public Good are issuing a joint statement reaffirming our commitment to support all individuals working to improve civic society and public government.

This includes technologists who are trans, queer, immigrants, disabled, remote workers, and technologists across disciplines and issue areas. Our communities welcome all individuals without regard to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual identity or orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, age, race, color, culture, language, nationality, citizenship, country of origin, profession, religion, political beliefs, veteran status, genetic features, genetic information, or any other any other identity or characteristic. Our support extends to their rights regarding access to healthcare and benefits, dignity, freedom of movement, and protection from harassment and discrimination.

Our organizations believe that programs supporting diversity, inclusion, equity, and accessibility improve our government workforce and aid in making government more innovative and responsive to the needs of everyone in our communities. Our organizations believe that better solutions come from embracing diversity, not excluding it.

While our organizations primarily support technologists, we’re lucky enough to partner with dedicated folks in public service and across multiple sectors and organizations and work together to provide needed solutions to the American people. Our jobs simply aren’t possible without all of the people it takes to deliver effective public services; we value all of them.

This joint statement is a first step. We will continue to support and highlight efforts in our communities to advance this commitment. Technologists for Public Good has been and will continue to proactively provide resources and programs for people to reference and take action as well as are building out advocacy priorities with members over the coming months. The Alliance of Civic Technologists will work with Technologists for Public Good to promote these resources and the Board of the Alliance of Civic Technologists will submit a resolution and action plan for a vote by the full membership at our next delegate meeting in late February.

The success of our communities and the positive impact their work has had on improving the lives of Americans is made possible because of the contributions of our LGBTQ+, immigrant, disabled, remote, and other diverse peers. The Alliance of Civic Technologists and Technologists for the Public Good stand in solidarity with our friends, neighbors, and colleagues in these communities.

Alliance of Civic Technologists
Christopher Whitaker, Director
On behalf of the Board

Technologists for the Public Good
Anicia Santos, President
On behalf of the Board

First Town Hall

We will be holding our first Town Hall, to provide anyone and everyone in our network a chance to have a voice and brainstorm with us on how to make our community even better than it already is. The meeting will be hosted using Zoom on the third Thursday of January, (01/16/2025) at 6:00 PM PT/9:00 PM ET. Please use the Zoom registration link to sign up.

Meeting Cadence

The announcement of our First Town Hall marks the beginning of a quarterly cycle of monthly meetings, scheduled for every third Thursday of the month. Our goal is to establish a sustainable approach to consistent communication and engagement with both our members and the broader community, while actively implementing and responding to valuable feedback. Each quarter will feature a series of three meetings, beginning with the Town Hall to foster brainstorming and ideation. This will be followed by a Delegate’s Meeting to further promote collaboration and partnerships, and will conclude with a Mixer to celebrate our successes and achievements.

Help Wanted: Join an ACT Committee!

The Alliance of Civic Technologists is looking for volunteers to help staff our working committees. These committees will help us manage the day to day operations of our network including helping craft our website, recruiting new members into the network, and hosting our first ACT Congress. Volunteers to work on committees must come from member organizations, but they do not have to be the delegate. We’re specifically recruiting for the Communications, Membership, and Events Committees. If you are interested, please email hello@civictechnologists.org

ATX Public Interest Tech Mixer

We’re excited to share an upcoming event hosted by Open Austin! On January 9th, they will be hosting a mixer to help ring in the new year, while bringing together like-minded individuals for a day of valuable insights, collaboration, and fun. Including a short panel about data-informed journalism, with local civics celebrity speakers from The Austin Common, a civics education platform, and Democrasexy, a women- and LGBTQ-centered civic engagement platform. Don’t miss out on the chance to be part of this exciting gathering and register today!

This Month’s Events

Here are some events happening in the network!

January 7

• Chi Hack Night’s Online: Open Hack
• Code for Boston’s Hybrid Weekly Hack Night
• Code for Dayton’s Monthly User Group Meeting

January 8

• SF Civic Tech’s Virtual Civic Hack Night ⠀ January 9
• Open Austin’s Welcome 2025: ATX Public Interest Tech Mixer
• FCI’s Workshop Series for Social Good Leaders

January 14

• Chi Hack Night’s In-Person and Online: Community Feedback Session
• Code for Philly’s January Hack Night
• Code for Boston’s Virtual Weekly Hack Night ⠀ January 15
• Code for BTV’s Action Night
• SF Civic Tech’s Virtual Civic Hack Night

January 21

• Chi Hack Night’s Chicago Landlord Mapper
• Code for Boston’s Virtual Weekly Hack Night

January 22

• SF Civic Tech’s Virtual Civic Hack Night

January 28

• Chi Hack Night’s Housing Politics Lab
• Code for Boston’s Virtual Weekly Hack Night

January 29

• Code for BTV’s Action Night
• SF Civic Tech’s Virtual Civic Hack Night ⠀

  Stay in Touch

Interested in chatting with the community in real time, join our public Discord server.

Does your local civic tech organization have a story to tell? Want to be featured in our next newsletter? Reach out to us at hello@civictechnologists.org

ACT Welcomes First New Members

The Alliance of Civic Technologists welcomed its first batch of eight members into the network this month. Our inaugural members include Civic Tech Atlanta, Code for Dayton, SF Civic Tech, Code for Philly, BetaNYC, Chi Hack Night, Code for Boston, and Code for BTV. We plan to onboard more members soon and are still accepting applications for new members. Interested groups can apply on our homepage!

Come hang out with us

On December 19th at 9:00 PM EST / 6:00 PM PST, ACT will host a virtual Civic Technology Holiday Mixer. It’s been too long since we’ve gotten together, and we wanted a chance to celebrate the launch of our new network. All are welcome! Register for the event here!

Civic Tech Atlanta Helps Feed The People

Civic Tech Atlanta partnered with Solidarity Food Pantry to help clean up their data and create user friendly improvements to their reporting system. The pantry, started in March 2020 to help food-insecure families during the COVID shutdowns. That grew into a community movement to help overlooked families. Civic Tech Atlanta was honored to help those families feel uplifted, supported and food secure. Solidarity Pantry has helped serve over 100,000 people since its opening.

While taking the opportunity to make some internal changes during moving physical locations, Solidarity realized they had a need to improve their current data quality and data intake system. Partially for the sake of organization and reporting, but primarily to prepare for a future data migration, Solidarity needed to review their historical data and reporting.

Civic Tech Atlanta worked with Solidarity to review historical data and identify data validation issues (potential duplicates, invalid addresses, entry errors, etc.), propose simple improvements to the current ad-hoc reporting system and understand the data and assist in preparing a data structure for a future migration.

Network Roundup

Here are some quick notes about what’s been happening in the network!

• Florida Community Innovation recently launched its digital humanities project, www.gobituary.app. Registration is open for their social good innovation workshop series: www.floridainnovation.org/store .
• OpenAustin will be hosting a social event on January 9th. Come join if you’re in the area!
• If you want to support ACT in the new year donate here!

⠀

Membership Applications Open October 29th During Virtual Session of Chi Hack Night

On October 29th, our Executive Director Christopher Whitaker will be speaking at Chi Hack Night to announce the launch of the Alliance of Civic Technologists inaugural membership drive.

We’ll be talking a bit about the history of local volunteer civic tech organizations, the advantages of being part of a network, and how ACT can support the future growth of the civic tech movement by working to convene, enable, celebrate and advocate for civic volunteers across the country.

The event will be virtual and will start at 7:00 PM CST. You can join the zoom call here.

We hope you’ll join us.

Christopher Whitaker named Executive Director

Over the past year, the Board and our counsel have been working to secure our non-profit status and build the ACT organization. We’re now at the point where ACT is stable and ready to grow.

In order to accelerate this and set ACT up to be the organization we all want it to be, the Board has asked Christopher Whitaker to be the Executive Director of ACT, and charged him with the development of the organization, its strategic direction, and bylaws. Noel Hidalgo, Jill Bjers, and Harlan Weber will continue to act in our roles on the Board of Directors through at least the process of establishing the organization, supported by Matt Zagaja as Treasurer, Brianda Hernandez as Secretary, Jill Bjers as auditor, and Jake Durrell as Counsel.

Christopher has been a long time organizer in the civic technology space as one of Code for America’s first volunteer captains in 2013 as well as being a long time member of Chi Hack Night.

Christopher has a hybrid background in public administration and product management having served in both delivery and operations roles at the Defense Digital Service, United States Digital Service, and Code for America. Christopher was recently hired by Skylight to support the US Air Force BESPIN software factory.

Preview of our Bylaws and MOU

As we approach launch day, we wanted to share a preview of the ACT’s draft bylaws and the MOU’s that we’ll ask member organizations to sign when they join the network.

The Alliance of Civic Technologists will be a decentralized network run by the membership. The member organizations will each be represented by two delegates and an alternate who will have the ability to vote in board elections, our budget, as well as propose resolutions to state ACT’s stance on important issues.

ACT intends to conduct business in an open and transparent manner. As a good first step, we want to offer a preview into our bylaws and our memorandum of understanding. We’ll open these documents up for feedback until the 29th before formally adopting them. During our first ACT Congress in Summer 2025, we’ll also have the chance to amend our bylaws as needed.

Join our Discord

ACT maintains a Discord server where we facilitate conversations between volunteer civic technology leaders across the country. Join us today!

Welcome to the ACT July Newsletter! We’re hoping that everyone is staying safe and cool during the extreme weather we’re having.

Writing out our values

After a few weeks of reviewing what volunteer groups put together in 2017, we now have an initial draft of our mission, values, and operating principles. Thank you to everyone who contributed their feedback!

The next step will be to share the draft document with our delegates for feedback. We’ll meet at a delegate-only meeting on July 27th to review the proposal and possibly vote for its approval. In the meantime, you can read and comment on the proposed document here!

Code for Boston’s MAPLE Testimony goes live in Massachusetts

As mentioned in the Boston Globe and Commonwealth Magazine, Code for Boston’s MAPLE app - the Massachusetts Platform for Legislative Engagement - aims to make it easy for MA residents to submit testimony to the state Legislature on the bills that determine the future of the Commonwealth. MAPLE will launch their v1 app on Thursday, July 20 after a year of amazing work by a dedicated team of Code for Boston volunteers, led by Matt Victor, in partnership with the NULawLab at Northeastern. Learn more about the project (and check out the code!) on Github.

Florida Resource Map

In recent months, student interns and the developer team at Florida Community Innovation (FCI) have been creating version three of the Florida Resource Map. The Map is a tool for Floridians to find social services (food banks, job resources, healthcare, etc.) near them on a unified digital platform. Our tool is also designed so social workers can customize suggestions of resources for their clients. The Map will compile a database of resources gathered from our nonprofit partners across Florida.

ACT reaches twenty members

ACT continues to grow, with three more members signing on and bringing our total number of members to twenty. We were recently joined by Code for Atlanta, Code for Hawaii and OpenSTL (St Louis). 

Does your local civic tech organization have a story to tell? Want to be featured in our next newsletter? Reach out to us at hello@civictechnologists.org

Thanks for all you do!

Thanks again for all of your support and everything you do.

– ACT Comms Team 

Happy Friday! The Alliance of Civic Technologists would like to invite you to a virtual social hour on June 29th at 8:30 PM EST / 5:30 PM to celebrate our filing as a 501c3!

This is our first step in becoming a fully-fledged non-profit. We’ll be filing in Illinois on Thursday and we’ll work with delegates from member organizations across the county to write our bylaws and continue the work supporting the civic technology volunteer network.

You can register for the social hour here!

Thanks so much for all you do,
Christopher, Jill, and Harlan

Hello! Welcome to our first newsletter! It’s been a month since we first launched the Alliance of Civic Technologists and we wanted to give an update on our progress and what’s next.

But first we wanted to give a big thank you to our initial volunteers and donors. Our launch would not have been possible without people raising their hands to help us stand up the network! Thank you! 🎉

Our First ACT Meeting

We’re giving former members of Code for America Brigades and interested local civic tech organizations until Friday, June 16th to sign their letters of intent and name their delegates. On Monday, June 19th we’ll send out a pool asking delegates to indicate their availability for our first meeting. If you are a local leader and haven’t received your letter of intent, please email hello@civictechnologists.org.

New Logo!

If you’ve visited our website, civictechnologists.org, in the last week, you may have noticed that we have a new logo! The connected star logo was inspired by Code for Australia’s original ‘network’ design with ACT taking a page out of Canada’s book and using the flag star to represent the US. Our colors are Old Glory Red and Democracy Blue. We wanted to give a big shout out to Molly McLeod (https://www.mollymcleod.com/) for the design.

Call for Feedback on our Vision, Mission and Values

In 2017, the civic technology organizations came together at Code for America’s Brigade Congress and drafted a Mission/Vision/Operating Principles document that reflected the values of the Brigade network. Since that time, Code for America has taken the finalized document off their website. However, this document was preserved in Github and ACT has forked it as it’s a useful starting point for setting our own vision, mission, and values. You can comment and suggest changes here. We’ll keep the comment section open until we formally adopt our governance structure.

Stay in touch via Discord

If you’re interested in chatting with the community in real time, we have an open discord server at https://discord.gg/EM6ywtMhkP

Thanks so much,
The ACT Comms Team
(Christopher, Brianda, Ben and Jill)

Does your local civic tech organization have a story to tell? Want to be featured in our next newsletter? Reach out to us at hello@civictechnologists.org