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.

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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.

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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

Gratis Prototyping

Gratis is a platform that connects restaurants that have surplus food with shelters to provide a solution to the hunger problem in Philadelphia.

 Public Site  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

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

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

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