Code for Durham

This Thursday, Colin Copeland, CTO and Caktus Group Co-founder, will be co-presenting “Case Study from North Carolina: Identifying Racial Bias in Policing Practices” during the prestigious 2015 Code for America Summit in Oakland, CA. This invite-only event joins technologists, activists, and officials ranging from mayors to White House officials to discuss technology’s role in civic participation.

Last Friday marked another ShipIt Day at Caktus, a chance for our employees to set aside client work for experimentation and personal development. It’s always a wonderful chance for our developers to test new boundaries, learn new skills and sometimes even build something entirely new in a single day.

Part four of six in our PyCon 2015 Must-See Series, a weekly highlight of talks our staff enjoyed at PyCon.

My recommendation would be Catherine Bracy’s Keynote about Code for America. Cakti should be familiar with Code for America. Colin Copeland, Caktus CTO, is the founder of Code for Durham and many of us are members. Her talk made it clear how important this work is. She was funny, straight-talking, and inspirational. For a long time before I joined Caktus, I was a “hobbyist” programmer. I often had time to program, but wasn’t sure what to build or make. Code for America is a great opportunity for people to contribute to something that will benefit all of us. I have joined Code for America and hope to contribute locally soon through Code for Durham.

Caktus co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Colin Copeland, is among an outstanding group of top business leaders to receive the Triangle Business Journal’s 2015 40 Under 40 Leadership Award. The award recognizes individuals for their remarkable contributions to their organizations and to the community.

International Open Data Day is this weekend, February 21st and 22nd. As part of the festivities, Code for America is hosting its 4th annual CodeAcross. The event aims to unite developers across the country for a day of civic coding, creating tools that make government services simple, effective, easy to use. Put simply, “the goal of CodeAcross is to activate the Code for America network and inspire residents everywhere to get actively involved in their community.”

This October, nearly everyone at Caktus took a break from their usual projects to take part in Caktus’s 8th ShipIt Day. Apart from a few diligent individuals who couldn’t afford to spare any time from urgent responsibilities, nearly everyone took a break to work and collaborate on creative and experimental projects, with the aim of trying something new and ideally seeing a project through from start to finish in the space of a day and a half.

In exciting local news, Durham and Durham County are launching a new site dedicated to centralizing public data in Summer 2015. Their press release mentions a health sanitation app Code for Durham built as a model of civic engagement with open data. Our own co-founder and CTO, Colin Copeland, is co-captain of Code for Durham, a volunteer organization dedicated to building apps that improve government transparency.

Colin Copeland, our Chief Technology Officer, recently spoke to WNCN about a new web application, NCFoodInspector.com, that lets Durham County visitors know the cleanliness of nearby restaurants. Colin helped build the application in his spare time as captain of Code for Durham Brigade, an all-volunteer group dedicated to using technology to improve access to publicly available sanitation scores. The group leverages open source technology to build applications.