Welcome/Resources

Welcome to Code for Kansas City
A civic hacking group.

Serve Your Community Through Civic Tech

Code for Kansas City 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.

What is Civic Hacking? This video will help explain it.

Who This is For

Anyone with a desire and a passion for applying their technology skills to improve our community, open government, and open civic data.

What to Expect

You can apply your skills and expertise to work on an existing problem or project you care about like:

• Connecting people with still-good items to donation sites
• Helping expunge misdemeanors and other crimes from crimnal records
• Launching a web app to address illegal trash dumping
• Creating an app to help residents find information about your city
• Helping residents get up-to-date information on government and city council meetings
• Creating an online resource for reproductive health
• Create apps. Design websites. Organize events. Write copy. And more!
• Hang out with other civic hackers, eat pizza and drink beverages.

What Not to Expect

• You can pick up expert advice, tips and tricks about new technologies but we are not a tech meetup or user group, and are usually working sessions not presentation format.
• You can meet a lot of new and interesting people and make useful connections but we are not a networking group. We are volunteers working to make our community better through technology.
• You can learn a lot of things about coding and design by participating in Brigade but we are not a code or design school.

How it Works

We meet weekly on Monday nights on Zoom, 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.

Required Tools

Bring your laptop/tablet as it’s typically a working group with the occasional presentation. Free wifi is provided.

How Projects Are Chosen

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.

Get Connected

• Join our Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/KCBrigade/

• Join our Slack

Get Inspired

• 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

Resources

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 to use GitHub

• Learn how to use the Git version control protocol

• Learn how the Web works: Read Basics of Web API’s

• Learn to Code. This is a huge topic that we will only touch on. Coding is a lifelong journey, but something anyone can learn through persistent practice, just like learning Spanish… it’s something you can’t just do an hour or two a month and expect to be fluent at. That being said, if you’re interested in software development, the web is full of excellent, free and (some) paid resources for learning. We focus primarily on web sites and applications first (rather then iOS Apps or Android Apps, because everyone can use a web app). The web is made up of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Everyone should know HTML and CSS basics before diving into “backend” languages like Python, Ruby, or JavaScript. Google is your friend. The brigade is not a place to get code training, but we’re all hear to help each other find the answers were seeking. Some random learning resources:
  • WordPress Meetup
  • Python Meetup
  • PHP Meetup
  • Ruby Meetup
  • JavaScript Meetup
  • R User Group
  • Drupal Meetup
  • http://codeschool.com
  • http://net.tutsplus.com
  • http://jsforcats.com - JavaScript Basics
  • https://github.com/maxogden/art-of-node#the-art-of-node - Art of Node.js
• Learn to License. Since civic hacking starts with open source software and usually encompasses free software as well, you’ll need to understand the myriad of software licenses out there and how to apply them to your work. We prefer and default to MIT license. Some learning resource suggestions:
  • Easy way to quickly pick a license
  • Various Licenses and Comments About Them
  • How to Choose a License for Your Own Work

• An introductory guide to open internet tools for civil servants

• Web Hosting Resources
  • Free Amazon Hosting (time limited): http://aws.amazon.com/free/
  • Free Heroku Hosting: https://www.heroku.com/
  • Free Windows Azure Hosting: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/
  • Free Github Static Pages http://pages.github.com/

Contact Us

Questions? Send us an e-mail at codeforkc@kcdigitaldrive.org or info@codeforkc.org.