Code for America is a new non-profit, and a new kind of organization. Our team is made up of web geeks, city experts, and technology industry leaders. We help governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the web. Through our Fellowship, Accelerator, and Brigade, we’re building a network of cities, citizens, community groups, and startups, all equally committed to reimagining government for the 21st century.
Some of the applications we’re working on this year include an educational tool for fire safety, a behavior change tool for environmental sustainability, a dashboard for the Open311 system, and a citizen toolkit. In each of these applications, we’re driven by the desire to encourage civic participation. Using these applications, citizens will be better informed and, therefore, better equipped to participate actively in the civic life of their community.
In this workshop, we’ll focus on the best practices we’ve learned for designing for civic engagement, and we’ll bring forward some of the design challenges we’ve faced. We’ll also engage your help in solving them.
Session takeaways:
- Learn UX principles that focus on how to activate and sustain civic engagement
- Be a part of helping Code for America design a fire safety and/or sustainability application
- Work with Code for America Fellows to solve specific UX/design problems related to the Open311 Dashboard
- Employ different methods for collaborative generation and synthesizing of concepts