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

SquadQuest Testing

SquadQuest is a different kind of civic technology project—designed to help people better connect with their communities and have more fun!

You can think of it like a realtime version of Meetup.com, or Facebook Events without the Facebook. Use it to discover small community events centered on activities that interest you and more easily rally your friends to get together out in the real world.

SquadQuest is currently usable and looking for contributors of all kinds

 Public Site  Developers

Clean & Green Philly Maintaining

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

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

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

Parkadelphia (Street Parking in Philadelphia) Commenting

Street Parking Philadelphia

Note: Project in discovery phase.

Street parking dataset for kiosk-metered zones has been requested from Streets department, likely ETA is 2015. Intended scope will cover creating a method to parse/manipulate dataset into usable format for API development, then UI development including a map visualization, searchable zone information such as allowed time period, cost per hour, kiosk locations and residential permit areas. Updates will follow when data is available.

Preliminary Data Points

  • Residential Parking Permit Districts _No set exists…
 Public Site  Developers

250 Miles Crossing Philadelphia Commenting

Short description of project

'250 Miles Crossing Philadelphia' will be a location based film in Google Earth: a NavDoc (Navigation Documentary) This NavDoc will consist of synchronized sound recordings and GPS tracks.

We aim to produce a film of 25-40 minutes and an interactive on line presentation of the work.

Examples of our approach can be found on: http://www.polakvanbekkum.com/done/routes-and-landscapes/google-earth-animations/

These examples are now presented as vimeo films, but we plan to present the film online as kml/kmz file directly running in Google Earth via…

 Public Site

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

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

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