Social Impact

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:

We recently hosted the first Caktus Pitch Competition: Building Tech for Good, which aimed to draw out innovative ideas and help make them a reality. While any web development ideas were welcome, preference was given to projects serving the public good.

For the first time, Caktus will be gold sponsors at PyCaribbean February 18-19th in Bayamon, Puerto Rico. We’re pleased to announce two speakers from our team.

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.

Developer Erin Mullaney was just in Amsterdam for RapidCon, a UNICEF-hosted event for developers using RapidPro, an SMS tool built on Django. The teams that have worked on RapidPro and its predecessor RapidSMS have gotten to know each other virtually over the years. This marks the second time they’ve all come from across the globe to share learnings on RapidPro and to discuss its future.

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.

When we meet potential clients, we want to learn more about their software development needs. Beyond that, we’re deeply curious about the work they do, those involved, and the kind of impact they desire to make in the world.

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.

The Journal of Medical Internet Research recently published “Epic Allies: Development of a Gaming App to Improve Antiretroviral Therapy Adherence Among Young HIV-Positive Men Who Have Sex With Men”. Epic Allies, initially funded by a federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant, represents a partnership between Caktus, UNC’s Institute of Global Health and Infection Diseases, and Duke Global Health Institute.

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.