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

Balancer: AI-powered Bipolar Medication Decision Support App Prototyping

Balancer seeks to solve the problems created by the trial-and-error decision-making process that psychiatrists/medication prescribers and patients go through when choosing medications for bipolar disorder.

If you're interested in getting involved, email kjost@codeforphilly.org or go to https://www.codeforphilly.org/chat and introduce yourself in the #balancer channel. Kat Jost (@itskatnotcat) and Tai Chan (@tai) are the project co-leads.

Project Overview

The mission of the Balancer project is to shorten the journey for patients with bipolar disorder to find stability on…

 Developers

PhilaVibes (Launchpad 2023) Hibernating

PhilaVibes Project

PhilaVibes is a map application that helps people in Philadelphia at point A with more time than they need to get to point B find a comfortable place to be between those spaces. The map will feature points surrounded by word clouds describing the spaces (and will show the name, address, etc, once the user clicks on that space). The user can see choose to see spaces around them, along their route, or around their destination.

 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

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

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

SEPTA On Time Prototyping

Plan your trips better by checking your SEPTA route before you go.

GardenHub - Community Gardens web app Maintaining

Matrix ID

Formed around the simple idea that food should not go to waste, GardenHub is the solution to the problem of community garden food waste. Despite the best efforts of community gardeners, far too often food produced in community gardens rots on the vine.

GardenHub is building technology to enable gardeners to collaborate and act upon what's growing, ripening, and available for harvest in their gardens. Using this information, GardenHub…

 Public Site  Developers

Leverage: Philly Campaign Finance Prototyping

The goal of Leverage is to empower citizens of Philadelphia to use campaign finance data when making informed decisions about who they donate to, who they support, and who they vote for.

The foundation of Leverage is the campaign finance data published by the City of Philadelphia. On top of the data we are building a simple user interface with a search feature that leads to a few visualizations.

Our Guiding Principles

  • Empower citizens to make informed decisions.
  • Not to single out individual contributors (we're not doing this to facilitate punitive actions)
  • Keep in mind…
 Public Site  Developers

Energy Consumption Visualization Prototyping

The goal of the energy consumption visualization tool is to enable interested stakeholders to be able to gain invaluable insight into their building energy usage and use it in making informed decisions about energy efficiency, investment in renewable energy, and overall sustainability.

This project uses the Department of Energy's Standard Energy Efficiency Data: https://energy.gov/eere/buildings/standard-energy-efficiency-data-platform

 Developers

MarketPlace for school partners Hibernating

We are developing a platform that enables schools to locate profit or non-profit organizations for funding and services, and allows organizations to reach out to schools for donations.

Original SDP request

> Building a technology solution that will match potential partners with schools. The goal is to develop a registeration site where partnering organizations will 'register' and tell SDP officials about their projects and describe there services. Schools would also 'register' and share their strategic goals and solicit partnerships in specific program and administrative areas. The…

 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

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

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