Civic Hacking

What's a better way for folks to get involved in civic hacking?

Civic Hacking

I want to create a better way for folks to get involved in civic hacking. This will require building a path to discover us, helping people understand how to get involved, and showing them enough value for their time that they effectively join the community. There are three goals that I’d like the following folks in a community or city to be able to accomplish within an hour of basic searching:

  1. Anyone interested in civic hacking can discover, join, and understand how to meaningfully participate in a network of like-minded people.
  2. A civic hacker can research local issues and be able to contact stakeholders and associated projects.
  3. A stakeholder in a civic issue or problem can find people interested in working on a task or project with them.

I am currently researching goals #1 and #3 with GetOrganizedBK, and BetaNYC has published research about “Data Design Challenges and Opportunities for NYC Community Boards” that would go toward goals #2 and #3.

This is an open source project that can always benefit from anyone’s participation. You can learn more about how get involved by visiting this project’s entry on Progressive Hack Night’s project ideas repo: https://github.com/ProgressiveHackNight/project-ideas/issues/3


Feature image courtesy Knight Foundation (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).