On a Monday afternoon in Center City, seven coders filed into a conference room to chat with Technically Philly’s Chris Wink about Code for America. Code for America is similar to Teach For America in that applicants are placed across the United States to help individual cities with web-based solutions for approximately a year.
Tyler Stalder, a 23-year-old who previously worked in Wichita, Kan., had this to say at Monday’s meeting, “For this month we are really in Philadelphia trying to learn as much as we can. We’re meeting with city officials, city departments, pretty much constantly for the last five days almost all day. We are trying to get in touch with as many community organizations, citizens, business leaders and block captains to really get an idea of what areas the citizens and the government are really trying to improve. Specifically our project is focused around that communication, so getting the citizens to communicate better with the government and getting the government to communicate better with the citizens.”
The Code for America team strives to help connect communities to politicians through web-based solutions. Better communication means more accountability and action and in turn increased government transparency. The work done in collaboration with Code for America is also shareable, which means cities with similar problems can look to the open source coding for solutions.
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