Event: Girl Develop It Philly Aims to Introduce Women to Civic Hacking and Open Data

Code for Philly Members at their December 17th meetup. (Photo by Kristen Gillette) 

Women make up only 2% of those who participate in open source coding, so for Girl Develop It Philly founder Yasmine Mustafa co-organizing an intro night about civic hacking with Code for Philly made sense for a lot of reasons.

“We’ve been talking to Chris Alfano at Devnuts about events we can collaborate with and merging with his existing Code for Philly Tuesday night sessions made sense,” said Mustafa. “In addition, we want to introduce more tech groups to our community of almost 1,300 members and Code for Philly is an important one to be involved with.”

Civic hackers create web and mobile applications designed to solve civic problems and engage citizens built using publicly-available government and community open data. Examples of web and mobile applications being created by Code for Philly include Open Trip Planner, Philly Flu Shot Finder, and Councilmatic. Find more of their ongoing projects here.

Code for Philly hosts workshops every week for civic hackers and tries to pair up with another group about once a month.

“About once a month we try to pair up with another group just so we can mix and match with another group, expose their members to civic hacking, and expose our members to whatever technology they specialize in,” said Code for Philly co-organizer Chris Alfano.

Alfano also added that the introductory event would be a little bit more structured then their normal meetups are because of the new people who would be in attendance.

“We’ll start with a networking hour where members can meet each other and grab free pizza provided by Devnuts. We’ll then provide information on Code for Philly followed by an introduction on civic hacking and open data,” Mustafa said. “A discussion on potential projects will ensue and members will then dive in and hack away.”

Participants at the introductory event – who according to Mustafa include both those who are new to programming and experienced coders – will learn what civic hacking is and how to get started. The 35 who have signed up so far included those both new to programming as well as experienced coders with the majority of them having not previously contributed to civic projects.

When: Tuesday, January 7th, 2014, 5 PM – 10 PM.
Where: Impact Hub, 1227 North 4th St.
Cost: Free, more info here.