Greetings Civic Hackers!

Today #CivicTech twitter was abuzz with news that the new USPS ordering website for free COVID tests went live. It was not without a few hiccups, it seems folks in apartment buildings are being restricted to one order per building at the moment. However when you get this they will hopefully have figured it out.

Save the date, we are tentatively planning a demo night event for February 22nd. More information is coming soon, but we expect this will be a hybrid event with both in-person and remote participation options. Our venue at CIC will require guests to be vaccinated to attend.

What we’re reading & watching:

• Meet the 2021 Brigade Network Team to learn more about the folks who are helping Code for America’s brigade network.
• Scaling Civic Tech a report from the Knight Foundation.
• How Comic Strips Create Better Healthcare is a talk about the power of illustrating stories.

-Matt & The Code for Boston Core Team

Jobs

Coding It Forward Summer Fellowships

The Civic Digital Fellowship is a first-of-its-kind model that empowers early-career technologists to explore careers in public service through a 10-week internship. Over 300 Fellows have served at 12 federal agencies since our launch at the U.S. Census Bureau in 2017.

Recognizing the importance of empowering talent to serve at all levels of government, we launched the Civic Innovation Corps in 2021 to create opportunities for early-career technologists to serve with their skills in local and state governments across the country. This past summer, 55 Corps Fellows served at 19 host offices across six cities and three states.

Project Updates

Mattapan Mapping

• We demoed our current product to Powerful Pathways tonight and received some good feedback. Github issues/tasks for both CfB and PP are forthcoming based on discussions.
• PP will also be emailing interested Mattapan Mapping members a job description for the person/role designated to maintain project, and is requesting feedback from us. If you’re interested, please DM slack Allentza (Powerful Pathways) with your email address.

Clean Slate

• Massachusetts Recreational Consumer Council wireframes for their website for events.
• Working on the testing framework version 4 will use an API to be faster and more reliable.

Police Data Trust

• All major puzzle pieces have been developed for mvp and now is connecting some of those final pieces together for users to start testing how the search functionality flow works for them.