| TOTAL | $1.5M |
| VENTURE FUNDING TOTAL | $1.5M |
| Grant, 12/11 | $1.5M |
Code for America is a non-partisan, non-political 501(c)3 organization founded in 2009 to bring web-industry professionals to work with city governments in the United States in order to promote openness, participation, and efficiency in municipal governments.
The first year of the fellowship program began in January 2011. 20 fellows were selected from 360 applicants, resulting in a 5.6% acceptance rate. Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and Seattle were the four cities were selected to participate in the 2011 program.
The inaugural 2011 fellowship program will launch four projects in Boston, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. Each city will partner with a team of five web programmers selected for the fellowship. Over 11 months, the fellows and city government will collaborate to develop a web application to solve a civic problem identified by the city in their project proposals. The completed applications will be released as open-source for any city government to use or adapt.
The applications that Code for America fellows build fit a certain model: 1) They are web applications – think Facebook, Yelp, Zillow, or Picnik; 2) They will enable cities to connect with their constituents in ways that reduce administrative costs and engage citizens more effectively; 3) They support the move toward transparency and collaboration; 4) and finally, they are shareable – which means that an application built for one city can be used by any other city.
The Civic Commons project was launched in September 2010. A coordinated effort between Code for America, OpenPlans, and the District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO), the project is focused on reducing public IT costs by helping government entities share code and best practices. In March 2011, Civic Commons helped make the Federal IT dashboard freely available to all levels of government, thereby providing local governments with tools to monitor project effectiveness and evaluate the allocation of resources.
Founding & History: In 2009, founder Jennifer Pahlka was working with O’Reilly Media at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, DC. A conversation with Andrew Greenhill, the Mayor’s Chief of Staff of the City of Tucson, sparked the initial idea for Code for America, when he said “You need to pay attention to the local level because cities are in major crisis. Revenues are down, costs are up – if we don’t change how cities work, they’re going to fail.” The two began discussing plans for a program that eventually became Code for America, “a one-year fellowship recruiting developers to work for city government.†With support from web entrepreneur Leonard Lin, Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, and technologist Clay Johnson, among others, the organization was launched in September 2009.
Leaders from technology and government, including Mark Zuckerberg, Biz Stone, Aneesh Chopra, Caterina Fake, and Tim O’Reilly, ask you to apply to be a Code for America fellow and help bring the innovation and culture of the tech industry to city governmen
Added: 10/10/11This is the story of the nonprofit by the numbers since it began in January, 2011.
Added: 10/10/11Code for America’s fellowship program connects civic-minded technologists with local governments to build web apps that make cities work better. In this webinar, Code for America presents an overview of their inaugural year partnership with four cities -
Added: 10/9/11Tim O’Reilly interviews Code for America founder Jen Pahlka about the CfA mission, and it’s call for 2011 Fellows.
Added: 10/9/11
