Team 3 - CfA Everywhere
Code for America’s model for public service requires a year of service and only offers 20 to 30 spots. In order to scale their impact, they need to leverage the cognitive surplus of 1.6 million developers in the United States. As of July 2011, CfA’s volunteer list has grown into the hundreds, fellowship applications exceed 600, plus their combined list of emails, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter contacts is over 10,000; a growing portion of those contacts has indicated to CfA that they want to ‘code for america.’ CfA has a tremendous opportunity to harness that energy in pursuit of Code for America’s mission of improving civic technological infrastructure by providing a coordination platform to help these people find each other and effectively code for their communities.
DOMAIN / INDUSTRY:
Non-Profit Public Service Organization / Tech Startup
PROPOSED SOLUTION (CONSTRAINTS / OPPORTUNITIES)
A volunteer coordination platform that combines the various elements and functionality of the following tools:
1) Multi-city platform layer which is the base for city-specific projects and the local developer community (Ex: MeetUp, Go, Code for America)
2) A front-end promotional site to publicize the goals and status of the project that generates interest and attracts contributions in the form of time and/or money.
ex) KickStarter -- People can learn about the project, contribute money, maybe become interested enough to become more involved
3) A forum -- Fans of the project can talk about it, contribute ideas, discuss next steps, plan events related to it (Ex: Meetup mailing lists, Special Interest Forums)
4) Project coordination layer (list of steps, tracking what’s been done) -- core volunteers, CfA community managers work on the deployment process here (Ex: github)
