#NDoCH CivicHack CodeforAmerica CfMIA

[codeformia-blog]

Code for Miami's Anniversary - National Day of Civic Hacking

We are officially one year old! To celebrate, we invited friends and family to O Cinema in Wynwood to check out some of the projects we have been working on throughout the year.

On this day last year, June 1st, 2013, Ernie Hsiung and Rebekah Monson met at the National Day of Civic Hacking event hosted by Richard Bookman. It actually turned out to be the 2nd largest turnout in the country! To keep the momentum going, Ernie and Rebekah teamed up together to form the Code for Miami brigade. At the first meetup there were about 25 civic volunteers to give ideas and help develop technology to make the community better!

Because of our civic efforts, we have been able to partner with great people like Matt Haggman from The Knight Foundation and Mike Sarasti from Miami Dade County! With their help, we have made great strives towards an Open Data movement in Miami Dade County! Mike has even applied for the very competitive Code for America Fellowship program.

Code for Miami meets weekly at 7PM on Monday nights at the LAB Miami. We have been working on some great projects this year, and we finally had a chance to show them all off in one place.

Adrian Cardenas has been working on the Text My Bus MIA SMS app working with Google's Miami Dade Transit Data allowing commuters to retrieve text-based time updates for bus routes. Ben Manley, a local highschool student, debuted his promotional video for Text My Bus, and it had a great response!

RepMiami is a web project that enables citizens to find their local city and state representatives based on geographical location. This project was originally started by Patrick, a graduate student from FIU. Because he made the application open source, Miguel was able to take the reigns and finish off the project. You can view the RepMiami website here.

For non-developers, there's the ongoing project, MiamiWiki.org . A local wiki site by Miami for Miami. Anyone can edit and add pages onto Miami Wiki. This makes it an ideal informational source for Miami citizens to place content they care about. This project is actually what got Ernie interested in Civic Engagement. Now that he is busy handling Code for Miami captain duties, Maggie Diaz-Vera helps monitor the wiki.

We also had the pleasure to have Rob Davis and Ryan Gates from Code for Fort Lauderdale to demonstrate the Florida Legislature Tracker tool which gives citizens easy accessibility to the bills currently going through government. 

We are so happy to share these projects and others with our community today and celebrate a milestone for our group! With the help of passionate local citizens, we have been helped make Miami better connected and have contributed to the growing Miami technology scene.

We have accomplished so much this year and it's all thanks to the efforts of the volunteers that come to our meetings on Monday nights and those that contribute virtually.

So with that we say Happy Birthday Code for Miami! Let's strive for another great year!