We are Code for Kansas City, the local chapter of Code for America Brigade supporting civic hacking in Kansas City.
Code for America Brigade brings together developers, designers, data geeks, civic leaders, organizers, and idea-makers from communities to help local government and civic organizations adopt open web technologies. Code for America Brigade is the volunteer arm of the larger, national organization Code for America.
What is Civic Hacking, this video will help explain it.
Anyone with a desire and a passion for applying their technology skills to improve our community, open government, and open civic data.
You can apply your skills and expertise to work on an existing problem or project you care about like:
We meet weekly, usually on Monday nights at the Sprint Accelerator, to either Hack (work on projects), Yack (socialize) or Learn (hear from a speaker). We use Meetup for organizing our events, so be sure to visit meetup.com/kcbrigade for the latest information.
The format for Hack Nights:
Bring your laptop/tablet as it’s typically a working group with the occasional presentation. Free wifi is provided.
We use the Lazy Consensus model, meaning that if you think it’s right for the group you have a green light, so don’t wait around for approval. Concerns can be asked, but if you don’t get much feedback that’s a good thing and you can rock on.
We choose projects based on:
Needs we identify through listening sessions with local gov and community organizations. We want to make things people will actually use.
Things happening in other cities that we want to bring here.
Things we like.
Our projects are usually centered around software at some point. Those are all listed in our GitHub Organization. There are also non-programming tasks in our “task list” at http://codeforkc.org/tasks/
Sign up on the Brigade web site: http://brigade.codeforamerica.org
Join our Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/KCBrigade/
Join our Google Group Forum: https://groups.google.com/a/codeforamerica.org/forum/#!forum/c4hrva
Video of CfA’s founder inspiring at TED: Coding a Better Government
Video of CfA Brigade’s Director inspiring at TED: Why Good Hackers Make Good Citizens
Video of [The Typical Hack Night in Chicago]((https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_on0kXZ07M)
Often you can start getting involved before the first meeting.
Look at our Forum for recent topics that you are interested in and would like to reply and contribute to.
Look at our GitHub open source code repositories. We welcome Pull Requests (mods to our code). Our Github
GitHub Push Start by the end of this you will have made your first contribution to a project!
Learn how the Web works: Read Basics of Web API’s
An introductory guide to open internet tools for civil servants
Our (Code of Conduct)[https://github.com/code4hr/codeofconduct)
This sites creator was Paul Barham, but many others help to keep it awesome. You can file a issue/request in our bug tracker, join our email group and discuss there, find us on twitter using @codeforkc, or just email pbarham@codeforamerica.org