June 2019

Ideas from the Code for America Summit

• Adapting other projects
  • Not as simple as forking something on GitHub, we'd need to look into stuff and do research to see how adaptable something would be
  • MealsCount?
• Look through other brigades' GitHub repos
• Waze Connected Citizens
  • While the city doesn't necessarily want volunteers in their enterprise-level systems, this might be a 'safe' way to do data analysis stuff and work on something with them
  • The leadership in the Department of IT would definitely on board for this - we'd have a partner!
• Space Apps Challenge in October
  • Call with Elise over lunch
  • She has experience with organizing these
  • Might be involved enough to take away from time spent at community meetings and finding partners for projects
  • We should hold off on making a decision until she's present to elaborate on how involved making it a successful event would be
• Project nights
  • Having a night where we'd meet somewhere like the library and work on projects
  • This might be a good time to make pull requests on other brigades' projects as well!
• Recruiting & retention
  • We kinda have an issue with recruiting, and people joining once or twice and never appearing again...which a lot of brigades struggle with.
  • Use non-technical language (helpful for non-developer members)
  • Having tasks for people who are new to programming
    • Taking data out of PDFs, if a project required that
    • Wiki-thon
    • Google Slides presentation with a summary of what we're about
  • Pair programming!
  • Different start times - officers get there 30 mins beforehand to onboard new members?
  • Make bite-sized descriptions for new members - elevator pitches for each of the projects down the road
• Attending community meetings as a group
  • Sean brought the idea of going to neighborhood organization meetings as a group outing
  • More constructive to have people attend as a group
  • More peer pressure to attend lol
  • Start small

Action items

• Get contact info for nonprofits, find meeting times, and see if at least two to three people would be able to attend them
• Clean up our own github
  • Should we migrate the markdown stuff to Google Docs?
• Update our website
• Make concrete a common council meeting that at least two or three of us can go to
  • It's always the second and fourth mondays of every month at the County City Building - the actual meetings start at seven
• We should do spring cleaning on our own github page
• YouTube page?