A day of workshops and hands-on civic geek projects in support of Open Data initiatives in the City of Seattle. 

City governments have a lot of information which is useful to all of us. This ranges from maps of local parks to building footprints to real-time 911 calls. We all have an interest in our budget information, legistlative documents and other resources that we use in collective decision-making and deliberation. Not all of this information is currently available for all cities, even though much of it is public record. The “Open Data” movement is a way to work on getting information into machine-readable formats, allowing for easy publishing, sharing, and reuse. We’re hosting DataCamps in CfA’s cities this year to build communities around making city data more open and accessible to allow citizens to help cities work better. DataCamp is a event focusing on skill-building and collaborative work on city data. It is an opportunity for interested parties in a city to work together, and build a network of people with shared interested in improving civic communications and information management.

Get involved

Email Us: seattle@codeforamerica.org

Follow Us: @cfaSEA

Visit Us: codeforamerica.org/seattle

Tech community, city employees, local community organizers, Government 2.0, online civic engagement, open source.

Code for America: Seattle

Connecting Local Leaders To Solve Local Problems

About The Fellowship

Code for America is a new public service fellowship that recruits passionate technologists to spend a year to work with governments be more efficient. 

About The Seattle Project

The City of Seattle is a leader in the movement towards open government. The city staff actively pursues citizen engagement projects: recurring town hall meetings, platforms for citizens to share ideas for improving the city, and online dialogues through Facebook and Twitter. The city has opened up access to many different streams of data and information ranging from building permits to crime reports. These resources present a valuable opportunity for civic leaders to become more effective and better connected. Code for America’s Seattle project is about strengthening the city's network of civic leaders and making collaboration between these leaders and the city staff more effective.

We Need Your Help

The Code for America fellows hope to take advantage of the great innovative work Seattle has already done, so they will begin by learning about existing technology tools. For the entire month of February the fellows will be in Seattle for the sole purpose of meeting and interviewing the civic leaders and city staff from the department of transportation to Seattle’s Neighborhood District Council.

Partners & Supporters

The Code for America Seattle project is funded by a number of organizations including the Knight Foundation, Microsoft, The Case Foundation, O'Reilly Media and the City of Seattle. Seattle was chosen as one of the first cities to participate in Code for America, based on its proposed project.

Seattle CfA Fellows | About Us

Chacha Sikes is an experienced developer who wants to make it easy for us to learn from each other to solve local problems. She brings experience in participatory education projects and in public design for collaborative projects for informal communities like local food systems. Much of Chacha’s work has been for interactive exhibits in museums. She was also a core engineer for the state of Missouri’s Department of Conservation. Contact: chacha@codeforamerica.org | @chachasikes

Alan Palazzolo is a web developer, focusing on open source software, data visualization, and mapping. He has worked in the non-profit and NGO sectors, having worked for multiple organizations at home and abroad. He is an active contributor to the Drupal community and is a firm believer that open source is more than just a software methodology. Specifically, he is one of the lead developers of the Drupal OpenLayers module, which is a robust solution for web mapping in Drupal. Contact: alan@codeforamerica.org | @zzolo

Anna Bloom has worked as a reporter and researcher for news organizations ranging from local newspapers to national websites. After graduating from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2010, she worked for YouTube to launch an innovative news project documenting the Bay Area with user-generated video. Prior to that, she regularly contributed to The New York Times Bay Area Blog and co-founded a hyper-local news site for Oakland in 2008. Contact: annab@codeforamerica.org | @annabloom