Since 2019, the Let’s Walk program has brought thousands of San Franciscans together, one step at a time. What began as a modest pilot evolved into a community-powered walking challenge that blended technology, sports, and public health—reaching hundreds of families in neighborhoods with some of the city’s greatest health disparities.
SF Civic Tech was founded in 2013 as Code for San Francisco as part of the Code for America Brigade Network. At the beginning of 2023, Code for America announced that it would “sunset” the Brigade Network so by the end of that same year, Code for San Francisco renamed itself to SF Civic Tech. In 2024 SF Civic Tech incorporated as a 501(c)3 tax-exempt non-profit.
SF Civic Tech and Technologists for the Public Good hosted their first in-person event post-Covid. The gathering featured insights from civic tech veterans Tom Dooner, Marnie Webb, and Nick Okafor, who shared expertise on effective storytelling, stakeholder engagement, and integrating STEM education with social equity to drive meaningful change in public interest technology.
Civic Tech Design 101 for the Next Generation of Tech Talent
Moving from education to user experience
2019 was a very busy year for the Code for SF community!
Code for San Francisco teams up with <dev/Mission> to create a Fellowship program to introduce San Francisco's underserved youth to civic tech.
An open source report from your local civic tech community.
This February, W.O.M.A.N., Inc. and Code for San Francisco volunteers launched a revamped version of DVIRC, a database that helps domestic violence agencies connect information with the survivors who need it. Shaena Spoor, the project representative from W.O.M.A.N., Inc., tells the story of how it came together.
We Vote is nonpartisan and nonprofit, founded and built by volunteers, including engineers from the Code for San Francisco Brigade of Code for America. We Vote is a networked digital voter guide that empowers voters and improves democracy.
Leo Sosa of dev/Mission gave the keynote at C4SF's National Day of Civic Hacking event. In the following interview he describes his vision for bringing equity to tech employment and how C4SF can help.
Partnership post from Open Data Science Conference West 2018 upcoming Oct. 31 - Nov. 3. ODSC West will be this Fall's leading data science conference providing over 340 hours of trainings, talks, and workshops spanning 4 days and 48 tracks.
The Civic Innovation Group has built a suite of tools that Brigade members can use to remove roadblacks and save time when working with filtering and mapping data, especially for people who don't have map coding skills.
A look at how Code for San Francisco's Data Science Working group was able to work with the local Small Business Administration office to develop a tool to analyze loan data and answer questions to increase the office's impact.
A tribute to our dear friend Sanat Moningi, we miss you.
Open Data Day 2018 Recap
Project investment fund releaunch
The return to Jekyll
The report back from Code for San Franicisco's Brigade contingent to the 2017 Code for America Brigade Congress.
Code for San Francisco first collaboration with Designers & Geeks leads off Provoke, a new event series.
Live long enough in California and you might experience an earthquake, wildfire, catastrophic flood from winter rains, extreme drought, and those are just the natural events. C4SF decided to do something a little different this year for NDoCH. Rather than a two or three day event, we decided to do a one-day deeper exploration of resilience and disaster preparedness in our neighborhoods.
My very first Code for America Civic Hack Night began with pressing a buzzer to gain entry to the Code for America building in San Francisco's SoMa district. A very welcoming receptionist greeted me and noticed right away that I was new. He pointed me towards the red name tags for newbies (as opposed to the blue name tags for returning attendees). The color coding of newbies and repeat attendees, plus the use of name tags in the first place, made it so much easier to strike up conversations with people and quickly learn why each attendee decided to spend their Wednesday night volunteering.
There’s nothing like a Demo Night to help a team focus their presentation and take stock of where they are in their project. It is also a great opportunity to recruit for their project and show the rest of the Brigade the work they’ve been up to. Eleven teams presented their projects and the progress the teams are making is inspiring. The project teams are working on a wide range of issues facing San Francisco residents from helping the homeless to analyzing juvenile justice sentencing disparities. Check out the videos from the teams presentations and join us every Wednesday night hacking for San Francisco!
Open Data Day is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. This year, it was celebrated on Saturday, March 4. Code for San Francisco hosted its Open Data Day event at the Microsoft Reactor and launched the day with an inspiring keynote by Carla Mays. @CarlaMays is a veteran of the Civic tech movement and this was a bit of a homecoming for her having attended Open Data Day’s previous incarnation, Code Across in 2013. Carla discussed how open data could be used to create a more equitable and inclusive society. "We've really got to start to see the faces of this change, it's got to be more inclusive and we've got to work as a team." She also stressed that “We have to address biases that are baked into data sets.” The key to inclusiveness and equity is what Carla tagged
2016 was defined by broken politics. Dumpster fire was chosen as “best representing the public discourse and preoccupations of the past year.” While the world of politics looks completely dysfunctional, Code for San Francisco folks continue to meet in growing numbers, committed to the ideal that our politics and government can work better for people by leveraging technology.
Code for San Francisco is happy to announce we are launching a new partnership with Microsoft to support the work of our volunteers. Beginning today, projects organized through Code for San Francisco can apply to access up to $2,000 to spend on anything they need to build stronger solutions; e.g. web hosting, training, data processing, user testing, or more! We are excited to begin this new experiment and look forward to seeing where it leads.
We at Code for San Francisco have one goal: to positively impact our community by means of the skills at our disposal, which for many of us means leveraging various technologies to meet a community need. This goal can be often distilled into two words: civic tech. And here in the Bay Area we have at our disposal a seemingly endless supply of technologists: developers, designers, data scientists, product managers, and many many more. I think in our city, as a collective community dedicated to civic tech, we do not have a lack of engagement on the latter half of that phrase. The former half, however, the civic in civic tech, is the real tricky part to get right. If the past election has taught us nothing, it has taught us that civic engagement with our communities is not something that can be underestimated nor ignored.
Code for San Francisco is happy to announce that Segment has contributed $5,047 to support our efforts. A huge, sincere thank you to Segment!
A San Francisco Brigade team has been partnering with SFHIP for almost a year now on a data visualization project that looks at alcohol licenses in San Francisco, specifically those establishments that sell alcohol to be sold off premise. Before any mapping or visualization could happened, SFHIP reached out to community advocates to find out first hand how the easy access to alcohol was impacting their communities. SFHIP lead community focus discussions in three SF neighborhoods, Bayview, Tenderloin and the Mission. SF Brigade members participated in these community listening sessions and helped SFHIP distill the findings using user centered design principles.
The past couple of months have been an exciting time for the Data Science Group Working Group (DWSG). The group, which started in January, brings together both professional data scientists and data enthusiasts hoping to improve their skills whilst making an impact. DSWG uses the wealth of open source data made available by SF Open Data and others to work on both its own projects as well as to support other civic hackers at Code for San Francisco. By providing data science expertise they’ve become a central resource to the broader SF Brigade.
We’re kicking off our #MeetSFBrigadeMembers series with April Steed – a UX designer, passionate civic hacker, and Project Lead for Lighten. Read on to find out how she got involved with Code for SF, what drives her and how Lighten is making access to social services more user friendly!
On March 5 we organized the third annual CodeAcross in San Francisco. The event, which was hosted at Microsoft Reactor, was part of a nationwide effort around the world to bring together people who want to collaborate to make their cities better. And collaborate we did! Nearly 100 people joined us to work on projects that benefit the community and San Francisco.
Code for San Francisco volunteer hackers launched the Happiness Survey to better understand the Bay Area state of mind.
Our Campaign Finance Summit featured a speaker series followed by a visual data exploration hackathon. Below we have outlined the motivating issues for Open Campaign Finance Data along with updates on resources that can further keep us informed. The issues are followed up by a summary and video of each speaker's contribution to the discussion.
Ethan loved to bring people together through music. His friends, family and loved ones will never forget his footloose spirit and ability to always get them on a dance floor. In Turkey, he was known to dance at a traditional turkish bar with locals in a bar mitzvah-type circle. In 2011, while celebrating at the Boston Marathon, he never stopped jiving to the street music, despite warning from policemen. "Dancin' ain't illegal," he'd say. He inspired people around him to enjoy life to the fullest and not take anything too seriously. His dance moves could cure anyone during the saddest of times – and they still do.
As Captain of Code for San Francisco, it is my pleasure to announce Microsoft as the Brigade's first sponsor.
What happens when you gather local officials, city staff, entrepreneurs, designers, developers, journalists and citizens in a room for one day, and ask for their best ideas to improve their communities? You get CityCamp - a lot of excitement, a little chaos, plenty of solutions, and a whole lot of action.
On November 4th, San Franciscans head to the polls to vote for, amongst other things, a tax on carbonated beverages (aka “Soda”). Did you know that pro-soda tax individuals and committees have raised $224,971 to pass the ordinance, while the soda industry has raised $7,700,000 to defeat it? Check out our visualizations of campaign financing.
The SF Brigade was fortunate to get an introduction to accessibility from Matt Arana from SSB BART Group, which has been helping organizations be more accessible since 1997. Matt’s introduction to accessibility came when he was working for a tobacco company. He had an opportunity to work for SSB BART instead, but wasn’t sure if it was a good career move. Since family and faith are important to Matt, he discussed it with his aunt before they went to services.
Many organizations and institutions offer access to free, internet-enabled computers, but there is no way for someone to find these locations without being online already. In short, you need the internet to find the internet. LocalFreeWeb makes it so all you need is a cell phone.
Agencies and organizations create and maintain many different community resource directories. Each organization applies similar resources and effort against a shared issue, but there is no shared knowledge. Although they share similar goals and challenges, these efforts work in isolation of each other. SF Open Referral improves social service delivery through shared, open resource data.