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2015 Fellowship Applications are Open!

It has been so great working with the city of Mesa, AZ these past few months! We’ve really enjoyed working on the issue of civic engagement and are excited to continue to see impact throughout the year.

Curious? Excited? Want some of this?

2015 Fellowship applications are open. Apply now: http://codeforamerica.org/apply

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The Unexpected User

During recent workshops, I’ve invited participants to share what elements they think make a great city. Most consistently, the response is having a diverse population.

I kept this in mind as I was designing the usability testing strategy for Team Mesa’s prototype. The idea is a simple city dashboard for residents to one-stop-shop: Enter an address and city information about local Council members, services, neighborhood demographics, and other pertinent city information appears.

In reaching a wider audience, I planned to be in several different community hubs in Mesa: a community center, the library, and a large non-profit. I connected with city departments we’d met during our residency, such as the City of Mesa Neighborhood Outreach Office.

And yet there I was, after my first day of usability testing, repeatedly interviewing similar user demographics. It was useful feedback, to be sure. But I wanted a more diverse point of view. What I imagined the following days was not quite what I expected: meeting the unexpected user.

Aaron* was a 17-year-old who wandered into my testing room. Curious about what I was doing, I shared the prototype with him while awaiting real users. What I imagined to be marginal interest at best turned into a full fledged usability study. Aaron had great insights on how he, as a teenager, could use the dashboard. He added ideas on what his friends would want to see. He included a social aspect that I hadn’t considered in my original use case. Additionally, he related to how his parents might interact with the site. I was pleasantly surprised at this insightful, young user.

Carla* came in after getting services at the non-profit. She was a bit distracted and quickly fell into agreement with most of my demo. She wasn’t quite focused on the screen. I started to wonder if I should just chalk it up to indifference and thank her for he time. Then a funny thing happened: I asked her about city services she’d be interested in. She started talking about her recent months of sobriety. It was a moving and inspiring story, one where I switched from interviewer mode to conversation mode. Carla became more at ease, finding comfort and strength in her narrative. I was in awe. It didn’t follow the prescribed script. I asked her if sharing her experience with others in the community would be an option she’d want to see in the product. She gave an enthusiastic response because it truly was relevant to her personal story.

Even when I thought I was conscious of diversity, I was totally caught off guard by Aaron* and Carla*. Their feedback not only informed the utility of the prototype in new ways, it taught me to really look beyond my prescribed notions, always keeping an eye out for the unexpected user.

-Wendy

*names have been changed

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Mesa/PHX-area Brigade Meetup - 5PM Friday

Join Civic Hackers and Organizers Friday, April 11th at ASU (Coor 5519). Narrate, Research, Design, Code!

Curious what this is all about? Watch this TED Talk.

Don't miss out on future events. Join the meetup group.

Can't make the event in person? Say hello on the google group. 

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We Want YOU. Test drive our prototype!

Come in for a sneak peak. Test run the new app that CfA Team Mesa has been working on. 

We're seeking a diverse group of residents to give their opinions: •Parents •Seniors •Professionals • College Students...Everyone who cares about the future of Mesa!

YOUR feedback will inform the future.

Locations:

Monday, April 7 3:30-7pm: Boys and Girls Clubs/ 221 W 6th Ave. Mesa

Tuesday April 8 3-6:30pm: THINKspot, Red Mountain Library

Wednesday April 9 10am-12:30pm  A New Leaf/MesaCAN/635 E Broadway Rd. Mesa

Free giftcard for your participation.

RSVP or just stop by!

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Street signs -> #civichappiness? Instagram as indicator? With @plusjeff. (at Blue Barn Gourmet)

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Back in SF

After an exhilarating 28 days in Mesa, we're back in San Francisco!  The three of us learned so much. We had great conversations and interactions with city staff, residents, non-profits, and our partners at ASU. Community events like CodeAcross brought in an extremely diverse group of residents. The NEW Brigade is ready to rock it. We're already looking forward to our return trip to find out even more.

All the fellowship teams were reunited this week. It was great to share our experience with the rest of the CfA fellows and staff. 

Here are some slides from our presentation.

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Learning all about a new urban bike-share program in the area. #cfamesa #cfa2014fellows #codeforamerica #gridbikes #bikeshare

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Inaugural Brigade kick-off. This is going to be great! #cfamesa #cfa2014fellows #cfabrigade #heatsynclabs

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And now for this commercial break. Another day done. #mesaaz #cfamesa #cfa2014fellows

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Great Pitches From CodeAcross Mesa!

I am really humbled and inspired by the quality of ideas coming out of Mesa’s first CodeAcross. Ideas include: 

Neighborhood quality assessment

StackExchange around voting issues

Global Food Registry

An open source library catalog

A local equity atlas

A “what happened” fire department app including dispatch audio

An audio landscape of Mesa stories

Geocoding agenda items/neighborhood specific notifications

Time to start brainstorming and prototyping! 

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Mesa's CodeAcross: a story in text and pixels

From Bagels to forming a Brigade, yesterday's #CodeAcross covered a lot! Everyone who helped make it happen or participated deserves a huge thanks.

Special thanks to Sarah and THINKspot from the Mesa Library's Red Mountain Branch for hosting the event! THINKspot has a veritable bounty of resources they make available to everyone from community members to computer whizzes: video conference rooms, powerful Macs, green screens, and even the kind of 3D printer that can be used to print anything from a cat to the Mesa logo below (sidenote: we have seen an impressive amount of 3D printers this month... personally I worry that they might just start printing themselves, especially if SkyNet from the guys at HeatSync takes off).   

In the following text and pixels, some of the day's activities will be replayed. Sit back and enjoy.

First, breakfast of champions and civic hackers!

Bagels, delicious muffins, orange juice and coffee. Tasty and filling aaaannd relatively healthy. (Just wait 'till you hear about lunch.) There is some hopefully subtle instagram effect going on this photo to bring out some color and focus your eye on the sesame bagels. Oh and they definitely got eaten. 

After snacks and socializing, Nicole from Code for America's SF office joined us to kick of the day with a brief talk about the cool projects that are possible when cities with data team up with civic hackers who want to improve their communities. Note the lack of people in the seats shown in city hall on the slide. That is sort of what we're all hoping to change, right?

Yes that is bottled water in the foreground of the photo. On the plus side, we asked people to sharpie names on bottles and refill them at the drinking fountain on the other side of the library. More importantly, Nicole's talk was a really interesting start to the day!

Rushing over to Red Mountain and back during a brief break from an all day event at ASU, Cody Ferguson and Michael Simeone joined us to share some fascinating presentations.

First, Cody talked about Salt River Stories, a free mobile app that combines maps and multimedia narrations that tell the story of a multitude of places in the area. Using their system you might learn, for instance, that the strong grid of streets in the area actually has a lot more to do with water than you might imagine. The ability to combine geography and storytelling was a interesting to multiple participants in the conversation and came up in various forms throughout the day. [Tech tip: check out Omeka and Curat(e)scape if you're interested in building something similar.]

Next, Michael talked about the IHR Nexus Lab at ASU, and the work they're doing to in both qualitative and quantitative research using data and computation. Below he's describing a network formed by twitter users, tweets, replies, and retweets and how his work helped understand the complex set of responses that flared up when a few racists got upset that they weren't getting a snow day at the University of Illinois. 

The work done there helped the university determine how to respond appropriately to a difficult situation.   

On a more lighthearted note, in one of the siderooms Tom had printed out and set up Walking Papers showing both aerial views and maps for the entire city of Mesa, and throughout the day we asked people to come and share their stories about the city and the places in it.  

You can see Tom carefully arranging the individual sheets:

On the right, Luis s holding an index of the whole city and on the left, Blaine is pointing at it. In the lower right, Vance can be seen supervising this work. If any of them found the hidden treasure they certainly didn't tell me. 

The exercise was really good at getting people together, getting a conversation started about places, about things that work well (bike routes along canals for instance) or don't (the part of the canal where the bike/ped path doesn't go through near the golf course for instance) and helping give us a better understanding of the city in general. Below it looks like Luis is pointing to the treasure... now I just need to scan and georeference those maps...

For lunch we had delicious and nutritious empanadas, both savory and sweet. This author was too busy dining on the delicious fare to bother with a photo, so instead you will find a picture of Marco (and his adorable daughter) from Republica Empanada, who shared his story with us earlier in the week. Marco not only feeds people at the restaurant, but also was instrumental in creating the Mesa Urban Garden which is located next door (on the same plot of land actually).

Lunch was also a great opportunity for people from all different backgrounds to talk about civic hacking. Here Mark from PHXdata is talking to Shardul from ASU and Wanda, who lives nearby. 

After lunch it was back to work! Participants were asked to pitch ideas for projects that would use and perhaps combine open data in ways that benefit the community. Laura Hyneman from the City of Mesa pitched an idea about measuring neighborhood quality improvement in correlation to city services. Tom took notes in blue ink on a white board.

Like I said, these are Tom's notes. That's actually a really good thing. That little sticky paper is this author's attempt at note-taking (you can't read it, but it says "geocode/map agenda items" which was a great idea that David Crummey suggested). 

Craig Henry and other participants provided helpful feedback:

And more ideas. Folks got excited about having a "what happened" app to show what the Fire Department is busy with:

Or being able to share audio stories about places electronically: 

And everything from having an API to access city data and services to creating a worldwide map of healthy local food (we had a great conversation about overly abundant fruit trees, a very good problem to have indeed!). 

  Finally, in the remaining time (there wasn't much!) we picked a few projects and mapped out what they might look like and what the next steps were. (On the subject of fruit tree maps, we found some projects that might help. For the 'map-agenda-items' idea, we realized that it sounded a lot like Councilmatic.)

And! Best of all! At the end of the day we had a great discussion about starting a local Code for America Brigade. This author already tweeted an image showing how happy that made him. If you're interested in getting involved with said Brigade, email us at mesa@codeforamerica.org and we can put you in touch with the local civic hacker all stars who are putting that together. 

Again, thanks to everyone who helped make this happen and everyone who could come out. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!

Until next time, keep (civic) hacking!

~ Peter and Team Mesa from Code for America

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CodeAcross Mesa/ East Valley 2014

Today's big CodeAcross event turned into an un-conference.

Participant driven, we had a fantastic mix of Mesa city staff, Mesa ITD staff, programmers, professors, hackers, residents, seniors, and even kids!  

It was a great day of presentations, pitches, discussions, mapping, community building, and the beginnings of a CfA Brigade for this area.

KJZZ, the local NPR affiliate, promoted the event!

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Viva Mesa! #codeforamerica #cfamesa #cfa2014fellows

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CodeAcross is coming your way! 

CodeAcross is Code for America’s multi-city civic hacking event that takes place in 50+ locations across the world. Developers, designers, researchers, public servants, policy makers and local residents work together to improve their communities using the people and power of the web.

In the past we’ve built apps, explored datasets, and inspired tech savvy citizens and civic innovators to transform government services.

Join us and sign up for this unique event today!

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image on Flickr.

We FOUND it.

Team Mesa was looking for a hidden treasure.

Getting to the space was easy enough, thanks to clues from our sources. But when we walked through the doors we were met with (literally) hundreds of grafiftied one dollar bills stapled to the walls. Amongst them was the one treasure. Our team deployed a divide and conquer strategy, along the way going through all the other unique, quirky, fun contributions. We finally found it -the golden ticket-above the Local sign. High fives all around.

The experience is symbolic of our residency in Mesa. We're trying to isolate one thing, but the journey has led us to off-the-beaten track spaces, interesting and supportive people who are making a difference in the community, and the distinct, funny, special stories that make up this region. 

High fives all around.

-Wendy

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CfA at a Ruby meetup.

Recruiting for the brigade! Lots of interest in CfA and a chance meeting with the Phoenix Open Data group. 

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CfA Presentation at ASU 

We had a blast talking with students in an interdisciplinary studies class. After giving a CfA greatest hits, featuring Promptly, StreetMix and Ohana API, we recruited for CodeAcross and the Brigade. The informal break-out session at the end gave us a chance to talk one on one and have a deeper engagement with the bright, energetic and articulate group.

Hello, future CfA Fellows!

-Wendy