Civic Tech

In the July 16 episode of Modern CTO, Colin Copeland, Caktus Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer goes one-on-one with podcast host Joel Beasley. They discuss the:

Have you heard of the Django Chat podcast? With more than 90 episodes on all things Django, it’s full of informative interviews featuring some of the best and brightest in the industry.

Pictured: Simone Sequeira, Senior Product Manager of GetCalFresh, with event attendees at Caktus.

On August 11, I attended the National Day of Civic Hacking hosted by Code for Durham. More than 30 attendees came to the event, hosted in the Caktus Group Tech Space, to collaborate on civic projects that focus on the needs of Durham residents.

Last Friday, Caktus set aside client projects for our regular quarterly ShipIt Day. From gerrymandered districts to RPython and meetup planning, the team started off 2017 with another great ShipIt.

During the past two presidential debates, moderators from ABC and Fox asked candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump voter-submitted questions from PresidentialOpenQuestions.com. The site, created by the bipartisan Open Debate Coalition (ODC) with the support of Caktus Group, is built on top of the open source Django web framework.

Caktus is proud to announce that we endorse the Principles for Digital Development or “Digital Principles”, a set of best practices that support technology creation for international development. We feel strongly that they help technology companies like us improve our contributions to the Information and Communications Tool for Development (ICT4D) community. In offering technical design and software development services, we often work alongside our clients to help shape the tools they need. Because of our influence in this process, having established principles are helpful to use as a guide in our conversations and design of the tools we build.

Code for Durham recently participated in Code for America’s National Day of Civic Hacking. Hosted in the Caktus Group Tech Space, the event was attended by more than 50 local participants.

Below you can find this month’s roundup of articles and posts shared by Cakti that drew the most attention on Twitter. The list covers coding for matrix factorization algorithms in Python, designing apps that optimize for sequential dual screen usage, preventing technical debt, and understanding the complexities and limitations involved in building apps for low-income American families.

This Saturday, June 4th, Caktus Group will be hosting Code for Durham as they join Code for America’s National Day of Civic Hacking. The day is a chance for everyone from developers, to government employees, to residents who care about their city to come together and use their talents to help the community. Attendees will collaborate on civic tech projects to be used by citizens and government employees. These projects seek to provide data on or improve government processes, addressing issues like health care, affordable housing, criminal record access, police data, and more.

We at Caktus were incredibly proud when the White House Police Data Initiative invited CTO Colin Copeland to celebrate their first year accomplishments. While at the White House, Colin also joined private breakout sessions to share ideas with law enforcement officials, city staff, and other civic technologists from across the country. Colin is the co-founder of Code for Durham and served as lead developer for OpenDataPolicingNC.com. OpenDataPolicingNC.com, a site built for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, displays North Carolina police stop data.