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.

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Relative Mouse Accuracy Test Hibernating

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….

Siuba: fast, flexible data science with python Testing

This project has two major goals:

  • help people learn data science with python.
  • build siuba into fast and friendly tool for data analysis.

It can be hard to get started analyzing data, so a major piece will be figuring out some format for teaching beginners (e.g. running weekly analysis sessions, workshops, etc..).

Background

siuba is an open source python library designed for quick, interactive data analysis. It's a port of the tidyverse from R to python, and supports a tabular data…

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Project Research - Documenting Organizations with Technical Needs Bootstrapping

Every month, dozens of volunteers attend the Code for Philly (CfP) 101 event, bringing with them a diverse set of technical and leadership skills. Similarly, every month, many organizations reach out to CfP about creating projects. However, two big challenges remain.

  1. There may be many organizations that don’t know starting a CfP can help connect them with technical volunteers
  2. They may need help in laying out a clear project, in order to recruit volunteers.

For this (“meta”) project, we will set out to document the technical needs of non-profit organizations, so that they…

School Budget Aggregator Commenting

The School District of Philadelphia has released School Budget information for the 2019 Fiscal Year as a collection of PDFs, one for each school. This Python download script (in the form of a Jupyter Notebook) aggregates these budgets and outputs them in a few CSVs.

 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…

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

PROJECT ON HOLD - Interpreter Training Commenting

PROJECT ON HOLD

Right now, there is a great need for court interpreter in Philadelphia for languages like Vietnamese and Korean. I want to build an website to help people study for these test. I have the content to study for the English court interpreter test. I would love to chat with someone in education or a designer or UX to figure out how to build this. Feel free to email me at nhu313@gmail.com to chat about this. The website I have built with my teammate is usable, but I think it could be better. Experience the thrill of Smash Karts ! This free…

 Public Site

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…

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School Needs Board Commenting

Let's create a site to help Philly schools ask the community for help. School would be able to ask for things like:

Materials - laptops, cameras, etc Time - one-time or recurring volunteering, with specific skills or not Experiences (like field trips!) Internships/apprenticeships

Basically, something like Donorschoose, but 1) specific to Philly and 2) no money involved - Philly schools aren't allowed to ask for money, so Donorschoose isn't an option.

Check out our GitHub! https://github.com/CfABrigadePhiladelphia/School-Needs-Board

 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…

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My EP Prototyping

This project is designed to provide middle school-aged and high school-aged students with learning disabilities, understand their rights as students with IEP (Individualized Education Plans). It gives them the tool to empower themselves and take charge of their education.

 Public Site  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?

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

Mesh Networking Hardware Hibernating

Open mesh networking hardware that can be joined together into a mesh network . Can be used on its own with built in screen or can have data routed to it to extend the functionality of other open source projects. We've nicknamed it HiJump because the signal between devices involves a combo of hi/low transmissions and because once a device receives a payload, the devices around it are checked to see if they have yet received that specific payload. If not, it then jumps to them. The goal is for this device to be small enough to comfortably fit onto a keychain, to contain a low-res character…

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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

Foreign Language Learn Commenting

This is an open-source project to facilitate the learning of foreign languages. The plan is to implement various ways that crowdsourcing can be used to create the contents.

 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

Data Science for Civic Hackers Hibernating

IPython Notebooks on Data Science for Civic Hackers

Instead of an app, my plan is to create a set of IPython notebooks on how civic hackers can do data science effectively. We are currently experiencing a surge of new data and tools that can help us derive conclusions from the data. Software packages containing methods from Statistics, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence have been open-sourced and available for all to use. Like all tools, however, you have to know how to use these methods effectively. There are other great IPython notebooks out there related to…

 Developers

Code for Philly Schools Commenting

A meta-project for organizing events and matchmaking to help Philly high-school and college students explore technology through civic projects.

Actualize.Me Commenting

A Dashboard that facilitates the exploration process of self through project based learning, challenge fulfillment, research based initiatives, and young professional service learning opportunities. - Primarily For High School Students

 Public Site

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 Map of Shame Hibernating

PHL Map of Shame is a citizen-led project to map the impact of the School Reform Commission’s "doomsday budget" on students and parents. We will visualize complaints filed with the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

The Pennsylvania state constitution says that students must be provided with a "thorough and efficient system of public education." If children are being denied educational services, parents, and others with first-hand knowledge of the situation, have the right to file a complaint with the Pennsylvania Department of Education. The Secretary of Education has a…

 Public Site

Public School Accessibility Commenting

How long does it take to walk or take public transit to the nearest public school throughout the city? How has that changed, city-wide, after the recent public school closings?

Let's build an interactive map that visualizes travel time to the closest public school — with options to show the map with the data from before the closing, after the closing, or allow the user to build their own map by interactively closing or opening existing schools.

This will both demonstrate how open data can be used to generate a basic "accessibility" analysis and demonstrate one of the uses of the new…

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What's Going On? Hibernating

A campaign website for promoting and collecting data about after-school programs in Philadelphia, and a mobile webapp based on Sencha Touch for finding programs from mobile web browsers or as a Philly 311 app widget.

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Summer Hackathon for HS Students (WebSLAM) Commenting

There is a huge opportunity to provide an awesome summer program for high school students through a grant with the Digital Media and Learning competition. I have a dream of pulling more HS students into the Code for Philly brigade with the idea of even building a student brigade chapter.

If anyone is interested in supporting some summer programming with HS students, the grant is due on June 10th. My thought is to run a hackathon with HS students who attend Code for Philly meetups over the summer, but maybe you have a better idea?

More info on the grant here:…

 Public Site

Philadelphia School District API Hibernating

Philadelphia School District API

A simple LAMP-based REST API for Philadelphia School District data.

This project uses

  • Open data from the Philadelphia School District
  • PHP / MySQL
  • Limonade micro framework for PHP.
  • Lat/Lon added to school district data using City of Philadelphia geocoder service and OpenRefine.
 Developers

After-school Wiki Hibernating

With summer school eliminated, provide parents and students access to a comprehensive list of credit recovery and extracurricular options based on location.

Leveraging the use of wikidelphia which is built using local wiki to list programs/activities for after school programs. Please visit http://wikidelphia.phillyopen.org to see or add programs.

 Public Site  Developers

GreenSTEM Network Maintaining

The GreenSTEM Network is an open source, Arduino-powered urban sensor network developed by a group of civic-minded Philly hackers in collaboration with the Philadelphia Water Department. It collects data from the urban environment (such as sunlight levels and soil moisture), and can be expanded as new sensors are developed.

The primary goal of the GreenSTEM Network is to enhance Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education through data visualizations, student engagement, and opportunities for data analysis and critical thinking. A secondary goal of the GreenSTEM Network is…

 Developers

School District of Philadelphia Budget - Data Liberation and Visualization Hibernating

The School District of Philadelphia posts budgets for their schools on their website. However, this data is in PDF format and therefore cannot be easily used by developers and others interested in examining the budgets of schools in a programmatic fashion.

This project aims to do 2 things. First, convert the budgets to a RESTful API for others to use. Second, to visualize the budget data in a meaningful way for the community.

The code used to generate data for an API is available on https://github.com/philasdbudget/philasdbudget….

 Public Site  Developers

LocalWiki Maintaining

A LocalWiki for Philadelphia.

Why LocalWiki?

LocalWiki is a new open-source system for creating geographically-rooted wiki sites. Unlike MediaWiki/Wikipedia, LocalWiki provides a visual editor for pages and represents every entry with both a page and a map. It's the perfect way to document the history and hidden gems of your city

Where is it?

 Public Site