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

PAWS Data Pipeline Prototyping

WHO IS PAWS - As the city's largest animal rescue partner and no-kill animal shelter, PAWS is working to make Philadelphia a place where every healthy and treatable pet is guaranteed a home. Since inception over 10 years ago, PAWS has rescued and placed 27,000+ animals in adoptive and foster homes, and has worked to prevent pet homelessness by providing 86,000+ low-cost spay/neuter services and affordable vet care to 227,000+ clinic patients. Just in 2018, 3,584 animals were rescued and 36,871 clinic patients were served. PAWS is funded 100% through donations, with 91 cents of every dollar…

 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

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…

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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

Voter Turnout in the 2014 General Election Maintaining

This project maps the voter turnout in the November 2014 general election. It looks at the percentage of registered voters who voted in each census block group; it also examines demographic characteristics reported by the American Community Survey to try to find correlations between demographics and turnout.

 Public Site  Developers

SocialVote Prototyping

What is this?

A platform to explore whether or not your friends, family, and neighbors have voted. We hope that people will use this information to encourage others to become active participants in democracy.

How did we get this information?

The Secretary of State is required by law to publish voting history and registrations for all voters in Pennsylvania. This information is available for purchase for $20. This is information does not include how people vote, just whether or not they have voted….

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Stormfighter Commenting

Stormfighter is a mapping project designed to optimize the Philadelphia Water Department's efforts in mitigating sewer overflow during rainstorms. The project identifies Water Department-installed stormwater mitigation technologies (such as green roofs, tree trenches, and rain barrels) overlaid on a graduated map of the city's permeable surfaces. This provides data on places where permeability is low, but stormwater mitigation technologies are not installed - in other words, places where flooding is most likely to occur.

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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

Mapping construction permits over time Maintaining

Mapping Construction Permits

Project Description

Mapping the change in construction permits over time to see if it indicates neighborhoods in change.

Help Needed

The data is now pretty old. I'd like to restart it. I've begun working with Ruby so I'm thinking about rewriting the project with Rails.

 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

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