Code for Philly volunteers give back to our community by donating their skills and time towards not-for-profit, civic-minded, open source projects. Browse our community’s project directory to identify where you can volunteer.

New to Volunteering?

If you’re new to volunteering or creating your own project, please check out our Projects 101 Blueprint slides.

For detailed advice on starting your own project, check out our own github ‘getting started’ project repo.

FYI - All our Projects 101 content is open source. Submit your own pull request to make it better with your own suggestions!

Remember, you’re a part of a national community of civic hackers

Check out Code for America’s project page for more opportunities to volunteer or for inspiration on the next project to start here in Philly.

Looking for our Code for Philly Civic Cloud hosting information?

Check out our documentation and github workflow here

Give Schools - Needs Board Prototyping

Overview

Supporting Schools Through Tech

We envision a world where every school has access to the resources they need to provide a nurturing and effective educational environment.

Our platform allows schools to post their needed supplies, contributions, or volunteers for events connecting them with warm-hearted individuals and organizations eager to make a difference. Whether you're a school in need or a benefactor, GiveSchools is here to foster meaningful connections and help cultivate the fertile grounds of education.

 Public Site  Developers

OpenDataPhilly Usability and Feature Enhancements Bootstrapping

OpenDataPhilly is a regional open data catalog, providing a repository for information about open data available from the City of Philadelphia, non-profit organizations, university research projects, and other publishers of open data about the region. It was originally developed by Azavea and after periods of stewardship by AxisPhilly and Temple University, it has been maintained by Azavea, and since Azavea’s acquisition in February 2023, by Element 84.

While most open data catalogs are…

 Public Site  Developers

Clean & Green Philly Testing

Clean & Green Philly

Philadelphia has a gun violence problem. This dashboard aims to help solve it by empowering community groups to carry out cleaning and greening interventions in the vacant properties where they can have the biggest impact.

Motivation

Philadelphia has a gun violence problem. Homicides have been on the rise since 2013. The past three years—2020, 2021, and 2022—have been the deadliest on record, with a high of 562 homicides in 2021. Community members need solutions, but many city-run initiatives are frustratingly slow or inadequate. Nearly 80% of the…

 Public Site  Developers

Relative Mouse Accuracy Test Bootstrapping

Eye-tracking is an amazing accessibility tool, but there are so few ways to figure out your best setup to get the best results.

There are currently no good tools, that I could find, to test the accuracy and consistency of eye-tracking mouse control across devices and programs, and I believe this information will greatly help in improving the technology in the future.

A fairly simple Python or JavaScript program should be able to provide this need:

The script starts by prompting the user to enter a seed value, which is used to generate a set of 25 random dots on the screen….

Philly Auto and Parole Commenting

ABOUT

Philadelphia Auto and Parole is a re-entry program to provide formerly incarcerated individuals and youth transitioning back into society an opportunity to earn a living wage through courses in automotive repair. In order to financially support the classes, Philly Auto and Parole functions as both a repair shop and an educational program.

In 2015, the one-year unified recidivism rate (re-arrest of a previously incarcerated individual) for people returning to Philadelphia was 33.9%. Looked at differently, this means that of the 24,089 people released to Philadelphia from…

 Public Site

Workforce Impact Analysis Maintaining

The pandemic has affected our global community in unimaginable ways. Many effects are yet to be revealed. In response, and in attempt to gauge the impact on the workforce, we are working with the City of Philadelphia to conduct an impact analysis and make a report public to inform future policymaking, as well as help people get jobs.

 Public Site

Reach: SMS Hotline & Integrated Case Management System Maintaining

Reach: SMS Hotline Platform with Integrated Case Management System

This is an SMS Hotline platform developed to facilitate a Warm Handoff to treatment services for overdose survivors. Reach connects people in need with service professionals at any hour of the day and across geographic barriers using SMS.

Reach's integrated case management systems allows for the collection of de-identified data which can be analyzed to find gaps in services, and inform needs assessments and feasibility studies for the expansion and creation of services tailored to community needs.

Together, this…

 Public Site  Developers

UliftU Website Redesign Commenting

UliftU is a community organization that seeks to provide re-entering citizens with the skills and certifications necessary to become Crossfit coaches. The organization is relatively new and has made a preliminary website designed to communicate their goals and purposes to both partners and potential participants.

They are seeking to update the website to make pertinent information more accessible to their potential partners and participants, allow UliftU to recruit partners and participants, increase website SEO, and make it easier for anyone to update the site to have the most…

 Public Site

PA Hospital Finder Prototyping

This project is a simple react/typescript app that takes publicly available hospital data along with a users geolocation and finds the nearest hospital location to the user and presents hospital information and directions in a card format to the user. WARNING geolocation in web browsers can be fairly in accurate and this app is meant for demo purposes only!

 Developers

Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity - Criminal Record Expungement & Pardons Testing

Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity (PLSE) is a non-profit legal aid organization that focuses on helping people overcome the barriers they face as a result of criminal records.

The project we are currently working on is building out an expungement petition generator for PLSE. The application takes in PDFs of clients' criminal dockets and returns fully formatted petitions to expunge the clients' criminal records. Having a clear criminal record helps those clients to better find work, housing, and services.

This project is built with React.js, Django, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. A…

 Public Site

Resource Philly Map Prototyping

Resource Philly Map (RPM) aims to make accessing critical services across the city quick and easy for people in need.

RPM aims to help folks in Philadelphia experiencing homelessness or other difficult times, connecting them with food, housing, medical care, and other services. RPM reduces the cost of access, by listing services that are nearby, personally relevant (e.g. gender/age), and with available inventory. RPM empowers community nonprofit organizations to log onto the app, update their information, and increase the reach and impact of their services.

RPM takes inspiration…

 Public Site  Developers

Prevention Point Unified Reporting System Prototyping

Prevention Point is a private nonprofit organization providing harm reduction services to Philadelphia and the surrounding area.

Currently, they are storing data from their programs in separate Excel spreadsheets, disparate EHRs, and partner data systems. This prevents them from being able to see all activities associated with an individual program participant, and also makes it impossible for them to do meaningful analyses that monitor program health and evaluate efforts.

This project would work to migrate all of the disparate data sources into one system,…

 Developers

Mamie Young's Finding Home Repair Help for Philadelphia Seniors Bootstrapping

So, if you're a senior with limited resources and you're trying to grow old and stay in your home, there's not a lot of help. This project supports Mamie Young's vision: creating a list of handymen and handywomen who sign on to do home repairs for seniors, at low cost and pro-bono. This is an important civic need. A few organizations cover some blocks and neighborhoods in the city, but in general, it's hard to find someone to help you as you age. Step one: let's make Mamie Young a webapp with a database, so that home repair people can sign up, creating a list that people in need can refer…

 Public Site  Developers

Youth Education Program Matcher Maintaining

Overview

Problem: Youth and Young Adults in Philadelphia seeking a path toward gainful employment often qualify for programs that assist them with obtaining further education and/or certifications to assist in gaining employment, but do not have a singular place to find out which of those programs they qualify for.

Solution: Create a form based tool that gathers necessary data from users and generates the programs they qualify for based on the information they submitted.

Technology: The goal is to create this tool using free Google products– Forms, Sheets, & Apps…

My Brother's Keeper Prototyping

My Brother's Keeper was conceived in response to the problem of lopsided inventory levels at donation centers serving Philadelphia's homeless. These centers often have an abundance of a few types of donated goods, while many others are in short supply. This web application will enable such donation centers to inform the community of what items they need by simply selecting the items from a list of their general inventory. If greater specificity is needed, they can add comments for any item.

For those who wish to donate, our main landing page will have a geolocation display with charity…

 Developers

Garden Hero Bootstrapping

Garden Hero

Garden Hero is an outgrowth of Code for Philly's Civic Engagement Launchpad 2018. This web application aims to help community gardens better manage their resources in order to cultivate a better community of gardeners.

The idea for Garden Hero was born when two frustrated community garden managers began to yearn for a better tool to manage their memberships, plots, volunteers, and donations than what was available at the time. They found that using a myriad of tools to manage the garden and communication between members (a hodgepodge of Excel…

 Developers

Cypher Philly Prototyping

Cypher Philly Project Wiki

The Idea:

The Philly Graph DB meetup group has started a new initiative called Cypher Philly. The initiative is intended to inspire and equip citizen journalists, data enthusiasts and social activists with the tools and data to do good for the city and citizens of Philadelphia.

There are a number of reasons why Philadelphia needs your help from public safety issues, to beautifying shared public spaces or even unheard police complaints. Our goal is to harness the untapped potential of OpenDataPhilly.org…

 Public Site  Developers

VagueRouter Drifting

My Apps 4 Septa App!

This was an old app from a hackathon in Philly, I created this visualization and technique for better understanding the routes and for users to dynamically explore the routes locally and in realtime.

I left a copy of it running here: http://middle.camp/septa/

Enjoy! :)

Please contact me for a commercial license if you want to use it that way.

Video of my super-awkward presentation of this app from that hackathon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAZCmvwZMgs

 Public Site  Developers

FortifyingFamilies Prototyping

Fortifying Families is an app for families/friends/advocates/supporters of incarcerated persons to assist the returning citizen in the reentry process.

Modus Prototyping

Modus-Keystone is an augmented reality game to learn about Pennsylvania's rich historical sites. Participants earn crypto currency for reaching new historical landmarks and for solving puzzles associated with each destination.

 Public Site  Developers

Megalithic Timeline OpenSource Project Prototyping

The Idea:

Megalithic Timeline is an open-source project I wanted to build in order to convey a better history of human made megalithic structures throughout history. I've been fascinated with uncovering the anthropology of the people who built these unbelievable monuments which have withheld the test of time and forces of nature to tell us about our past.

Build Goal:

My goal with this project is to help bring together people who are interested in discovery history through coding together to build dynamic apps to help convey this history to broader audiences. This Tool will be…

 Public Site  Developers

Silly Utility Testing

Silly Utility

Compare utility bills with neighbors. https://sillyutility.net/

Motivation

You're a Comcast customer for 33 years… but someone else on your block gets better service for less money.

Companies charge whatever they want… they make you buy phone service and you don't even have a phone.

Solution

We help negotiate your bill.

See what your neighbors pay, and call to ask for the same deal.

Features

Philly — Works in Philadelphia, PA and surrounding neighborhoods.

It's free — We do not charge money for this service.

**You…

 Public Site  Developers

BelieveAchieve: Free, online, on-demand tutoring for disadvantaged students Bootstrapping

About Believe Achieve

BelieveAchieve is a volunteer-run ed-tech initiative seeking to provide on-demand educational and guidance services to disadvantaged high school students in the U.S. Our 3-pronged approach will consist of free, online, and on-demand: mentoring, tutoring, and college counseling. We are planning to pilot our model in the NYC metropolitan area beginning in January 2017. During the pilot, BelieveAchieve will focus on delivering math tutoring, general mentorship, and college admissions guidance to low-income public high school students in the NYC area. After our NYC…

 Public Site  Developers

Stately Testing

Form-driven workflow engine. Making city government better, one form at a time.

Government, like many organizations, have a ton of processes. For example:

  • Leave request
    • employee submits form, manager approves, entry is able to be looked up later
  • Travel request
    • like leave request, but director must also approve, and if >$500, CFO must approve
  • New hire onboarding
    • multiple tasks that can be completed asynchronously. perhaps when all 3 tasks are done, the 4th task is able to begin
  • Contract
    • Document-oriented (w/signature) vs content-oriented
  • Freedom of…
 Developers

Imminently Dangerous Hibernating

A project working to identify substandard rental housing.

Original problem statement: "How can we identify substandard housing? Many rental properties are unlicensed and other with many code violations. How can L&I keep track of which properties should have licenses but do not? Are there indicators that L&I could use to isolate which types/locations most likely aren't up to code?"

TEAM STATEMENT:

L&I goal (to be approved by Shannon) - to provide a minimum standard of living for every resident of Philadelphia.

Team goal - Provide information highlighting properties below minimum…

 Developers

Govmeeting Prototyping

Software to improve involvement in local government.

Shortly after a government meeting, you will be able to:

  • Receive via text or email, a summary of issues discussed.

  • See exactly what was said on each issue that you select.

  • Receive a text or email alert when an issue that you select is discussed.

At any time, you can go online and see:

  • All issues discussed in past meetings.

  • All that was said in the past on any specific topic.

  • Exactly what any specific official said on any specific topic. This is especially useful at election time.

NOTE: The current…

 Developers

Jail Jawn Maintaining

Jail Jawn

Data Source: (http://www.phila.gov/prisons/page.htm)

What is Jail Jawn and Why?

This is the repository for the JailJawn.com scraper code written in Python. This started as a project to learn Python and Serverless deployment.

The following code in the repository accesses the static page provided by The City of Philadelphia Department of Prisons Census page (http://www.phila.gov/prisons/page.htm). This web page is generated internally possible by a human at infrequent times using Excel to HTML which doesn't create clean tables for scraping which requires a custom…

 Public Site  Developers

Female Political Representation in PA Bootstrapping

Some women from Rittenhouse Political stopped by Code for Philly a month or two ago to ask for help with a data set in CSV. They would like to visually display the data in tables, graphs, and ultimately a "heat map" to show how women have been represented in PA from 2000-2014. Click the developer's link to go to the GitHub page. We are working in Python and potentially JavaScript down the line to display this data in a palatable manner for end users.

 Developers

Addictive Science Prototyping

This project is my effort to get the startup Addictive Science involved with the local Philadelphia Science/Tech communities. Addictive Science is an online learning environment designed to virtually immerse everyday people in discovery & curiosity while engaging minds with STEM Sciences through online social discovery apps. I started building www.AddictiveScience.com as a means to embrace my new career in Science Communication and Technology. The programming & design goals of Addictive Science from conception were to make all of our code open…

 Public Site  Developers

Resource Awareness for Philly Prototyping

Resource Awareness Philly is a open-source project that started at the Code for Philly SustyHack2015 from 10/17/15 - 10/18/15 in Philly. The goals of the project are

  1. To create a comprehensive data set for all services for folks who need little help to get back in the game in Philly.

  2. Provide web service REST apis to access and update the data set so that clients (web/mobile) can be developed.

  3. Build a responsive web application that users in Philly can access on public library computers etc. as well as by services providers on desktop and mobile devices.

  4. Iterative UI…

 Developers

Social Hub For Programmers Commenting

I want to create a social hub for programmers to do daily challenges. The objective of this project is to create a website where users can post programming questions and users are allowed to challenge them by answer the programming question. In the end establishing a community of programming elites. Does anyone want to hop onboard?

Not in Philly Testing

Not in Philly

Being built in the open at Notinphilly.org

Nice write up on the project is at: https://codeforphilly.org/blog/not_in_philly_cleans_house

In return for a 6 month commitment to go out once a week to pick up the litter on a block, we supply citizens the resources (bags and a trash grabber) and incentives (gift cards drawn from member pics of their cleaned block #notinphilly on Instagram).

Drop us a line at notinphilly@gmail.com. We also like to chat on slack, https://notinphilly.slack.com/

The to-do…

 Public Site  Developers

Philly Transpo Art Prototyping

About

A view of the [select] modes of transport, revealed by activation, to illustrate the levels/amount/rate of movement across the city.

Bike share pods flash when the number of bikes available changes (currently 15 minute intervals) Rail stations change with frequency of service during 15 minute windows (radius changes for heavy rail, opacity changes for light rail) Bus routes traced by shooters (eventually will glow more heavily based on bus frequency) See @karaml's project pitch here.

Data

Quasi-realtime data from the…

 Public Site  Developers

Septa Ninja Testing

  • Real time and accessibility problems can take time to reach SEPTA control center
  • Riders have ability to share issues quicker than workers can
  • Mimic and improve Boston’s civic transit app - http://mbta.ninja
  • Create a "Waze-like" app for train issues that can reach riders in real time

Get set up - see our README page

For details of features/bugs you can work on go to Github issues

Here is the [Google docs…

 Public Site  Developers

Who Won Philly Maintaining

Tim Wisniewski wrote an election scraper with Kimono and a html page to display live election results scraped from http://phillyelectionresults.com/.

Kevin Clough wrote a node scraper based on Nightmare(https://github.com/segmentio/nightmare) to poll the last modified date of the page, scrape and cache the results as necessary.

Scraper:http://git.kclough.me/kclough/nodeelectionscraper WhoWon Front End: github.com/timwis/whowon

Live Results can be viewed here: (based off of test data for now) https://twitter.com/timwis/status/600795295144910848

 Public Site  Developers

Friendtervention Prototyping

An web app designed at the Apps for Philly Health hackathon in May 2015. The goal of the app is assist a user in finding the best options available when facing a mental health crisis.

 Public Site

Indego-Flow Commenting

Monitoring Indego bike share to monitor bike arrivals and departures at specific stations.

Could be helpful for determining best way to handle and re-distrbute bike.

 Public Site  Developers

Code Help Desk Maintaining

This is the help desk table for questions that you may not have awnsers to, headed by patrick and karin we will try to help you with you're codeing probles

Philly Vote Check Prototyping

iOS repo: https://github.com/jtwiest/PhillyVoteCheck

web repo: https://github.com/CfABrigadePhiladelphia/philly-vote-check front-end is on gh-pages branch; master branch has server-side components

Philly Vote Check

Overview:

Where is my Polling station? This Application is designed to help voters identify and locate their polling place based on their district, ward and/or address. In addition, the application will help voter that need assistance with accessibility locate polling places that can accommodate their needs.

Features:

Philly Vote Check will provide the…

 Public Site  Developers

Philly Ward Leaders Maintaining

How many of you have heard of all of the judges who ran in the last election? How about all the Council at-large candidates? How about all the State Representative candidates? Most people who show up to vote have not heard of all the candidates. Instead, they're given flyers on the way in, often by their neighbors, suggesting who they should vote for. But who determines what's on the flyers? Ward leaders. And how many of you know who your ward leader is?

Let's use data to show:

  • Who they are
  • What they do…
 Public Site  Developers

PA School District Funding Hibernating

I wanted to know how school funding in Philadelphia compares to the rest of the state. The state Department of Education publishes enrollment and expenditure figures for every school district in the state. Here are some graphs of these data.

 Public Site  Developers

YadaGuru - College Application Reminders Maintaining

Yadaguru is an app that helps Philly High School Seniors remember all the things they have to do to submit complete applications to college on time. We're solving the problem of doors closing to good schools because of dumb stuff like a transcript getting in after a deadline. We do this through sending multiple reminders well before stuff is due. Whole support structures around students can use the app as well so they can be part of the 'reminder team' that helps kids get the docs in on time.

Release 1 was our web app https://www.yadaguru.com. You can get reminders, send them to…

 Public Site  Developers

VoteWise.net Prototyping

VoteWise

Using Mongo, NextJS

2 min Video https://player.vimeo.com/video/408236980

VoteWise.net is a non-partisan non-profit website that connects voters, organizations, and politicians without advertising dollars getting in the way. Right now, politicians have serious challenges reaching voters without advertising. This means that politicians have to waste a lot of time begging for money instead of doing what they want to do — help the community. This often forces politicians to listen more closely to the people who give them money than they do to the voters. Likewise,…

 Public Site  Developers

Philly Bike Coalition Survey App Maintaining

Project Summary

Each year, the Philadelphia Bike Coalition oversees an army of volunteers to collect bike ridership data across the city of Philadelphia. Today, the data collection and data analysis processes are all completed with the use of pen, paper, and lots of data entry.

We want to help the Bike Coalition (and any future users) spend less time with data management grunt work so that they can spend more time using the data!

Instead of using paper forms, we aim to provide a digital solution allowing survey volunteers to collect data with a mobile-ready website (or hybrid…

 Public Site  Developers

Whathood - crowdsourcing neighborhood borders Maintaining

What Hood Is This?

Whathood aims to settle the neighborhood border debate for all time by aggregating neighborhood borders drawn by users into heatmaps showing the "identity" of a location.

http://whathood.in

Development

Implementation

  • PHP and the Zend framework, LeafletJS, CoffeeScript, PostGres/PostGIS

Help Needed

  • seasoned developer interested in the project
  • site testers when…
 Public Site  Developers

Unlock Philly Maintaining

Using open data and crowd sourcing our mission is to make Philadelphia a more accessible city that welcomes and embraces people of all ages and abilities.

We are "building with, not for" and doing our best to ensure that our meetup spaces and tools are accessible. CityCoho is completely wheelchair accessible including the restrooms; Devnuts' entrance is wheelchair accessible and the restroom is large and on the same level, but there are no grab bars. The seating at both spaces is wheelchair friendly.

An accessible website/app is our number one priority. We value all contributions that…

 Public Site  Developers

Kiqstnd Bootstrapping

A bike parking locator that allows users to find Bike Parking published through Open Data Philly and allows for user input to display parking they've discovered. In addition, a map overlay of Bike Theft data would be able to be toggled to show theft by month and year.

This project has not had much activity since its inception in October 2013 but I would love to kickback the Kiqstnd, and get this going again!!!

Are you interested in working on a cool Bicycle App?

Kiqstnd needs you.

 Developers

Enter/Return Commenting

Original Idea: http://studiocns.org/enterreturn/

To see the underlying resource data, look at the networkofcare_lat_lng.csv within the /data folder.

 Developers

myPhillyRising Commenting

myPhillyRising

A mobile web app by OpenPlans to support the outreach work of the PhillyRising collaborative. PhillyRising targets neighborhoods throughout Philadelphia that are plagued by chronic crime and quality of life concerns, and establishes partnerships with community members to address these issues. The PhillyRising Team coordinates the actions of City agencies to help neighbors realize their vision for their community through sustainable, responsive, and cost-effective solutions. Read more at…

 Public Site  Developers

Bike Route Tracker (CyclePhilly) Drifting

I am interested in developing a smartphone-based project to collect voluntary data on cyclists' bike route preferences.

The goal is to promote the app during a two to four week window where city or regional bicyclists would be encouraged to download and use the app to track their biking habits. The route data would be linked to a webmapping viewer that would allow users to the recorded routes and bike patterns of of all participants in realtime (users get fun instant feedback, we get great if self-selectedâ data in the aggregate).

The data generated would supplement the Delaware…

 Public Site  Developers

ArcConsole Maintaining

ArcConsole is a simple, intuitive console for the ArcGIS Server REST API. It's intended for people not familiar with the ArcGIS REST API or users that want to get their data quickly and move on with their application. It does this by making some decisions for you, like for instance since you're on the internet the spatial reference you're using is probably WGS 84 (4326). It also uses JavaScript libraries like Chosen and Leaflet Draw to help you construct your query parameters how you need them.

 Public Site  Developers