Code for Durham

We’re reviving a blog series from a few years ago in which we compile and share the things Cakti are clicking on — articles, videos, podcasts — whether it’s tech-related, an idea for social good, or just something interesting or amusing that caught someone’s eye. Have a look at this recommended reading and let us know what you think:

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.

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.

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.

Last Friday, the Cakti set aside regular client projects for our quarterly ShipIt Day, a chance for personal development and independent projects. People work individually or in groups to flex their creativity, tackle interesting problems, or expand their personal knowledge. This quarter’s ShipIt Day was all about open source contributions, frontend fixes, and learning new (or revisiting old) programming languages. Read about the various ShipIt Day projects for Q2 of 2016 below.

Last Friday, the Cakti set aside regular client projects for our quarterly ShipIt Day, a chance for personal development and independent projects. People work individually or in groups to flex their creativity, tackle interesting problems, or expand their personal knowledge. This quarter’s ShipIt Day saw everything from cat animations to improvements on our Taylor Swift lyric generator app. Read about the various ShipIt Day projects for Q1 of 2016 below.

Today, at Caktus headquarters, CTO and co-founder of Caktus Colin Copeland will stand at a press conference along with activists, police representatives, and elected officials to announce the launch of OpenDataPolicingNC.com. The first site of its kind, OpenDataPolicingNC.com draws on public records to publish up-to-date stop, search, and use-of-force data—broken down by race and ethnicity—for every police department and officer in the state of North Carolina. The volunteer effort, led by The Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ) and technical leadership by Colin, includes approximately 20 million anonymized data points from 15 years of NC traffic stop data.

Recently, Caktus co-founder Colin Copeland spoke about the creation of a web app that analyzes North Carolina traffic stop data to identify racial bias during the Code for America 2015 Summit. The website allows both police departments and community members to visualize a dataset of more than 18 million stops statewide. Colin spoke with Ian Mance, the originator of the app idea and staff attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. Together with fellow community members, Andy Shapiro and Dylan Young, they used Django, an open source web framework, to make policing data more accessible.

Members of one team joined forces with local meetup Code for Durham to help with the alpha launch of the School Navigator App. Using publicly available data, the School Navigator, allows users to geolocate nearby Durham schools and view information like performance ratings. The team included Code for Durham co-founder Colin Copeland who upgraded the Django template for the latest version of SALT. Erin Mullaney helped expand a feature denoting different school zones on the map, using Angular for the first time to do so. She also worked on a query change to more closely match the rules of districting on the map’s display. [Victor Rocha] developed various bug fixes, and merged pull requests. In the meantime, David Ray put his new Ionic skills to the test by building a mobile app version of the School Navigator, now available from the Google App store. (David’s starting Ship It Day project was working through an Ionic tutorial to create a Reddit viewing app with pull refresh and infinite scrolling.)