Unlikely Paths to Civic Tech!

Greetings Civic Hackers!

It’s Nhi, again. (Matt will be back next week with the usual programming.) Besides unlikely people in civic tech, there are also unlikely paths to civic tech. While most people, who join Code for Boston and civic tech in general, are fresh out of school, some people are from unlikely places.

You probably already know that our team leader, Matt, used to be a lawyer before he switched to being a software engineer. Of course, these two career paths couldn’t be more different. The career move didn’t happen over night either. He attended Harvard University on a full scholarship to further his education and change his career. Another team leader and project lead, Thad, also has an interesting origin story. He used to work in the Peace Corps for 2 years to teach desktop computing and system administraton in Tanzania. You wouldn’t be able to tell he can speak fluent Swahili by just looking at him. As for me, I worked in video production for almost 10 years and decided to go back to school and study full stack web development because I wanted a skill that would allow me to work regular work days/hours. I also chose web development because I used to make basic websites as a child for fun and wished someone told me earlier that I could do that for money.

What was your path to civic tech?

Job Openings:

• Institute for Nonprofit Practice is accepting applications for their fellowship/professional development programs and are offering tuition subsidies up to 100% for anyone who needs one.
• Cortico is hiring for an Engineering Team Lead!
• Toast is hiring engineers and more in Massachusetts and beyond!
• Chewy is hiring engineers and more in Boston and beyond!

Events:

• April 20-21: [ODSC East 2022

  Open Data Science Conference](https://odsc.com/boston/#register)

• April 26: Suffolk’s Legal Innovation and Technology (LIT) Lab
• April 29: Join us for a panel discussion on what it takes to make interactions with government less of a burden. Nava is a public benefit corporation creating software to improve how our government serves people.
• May 10: Boston New Technology is a not-for-profit startup, technology, and business community, whose mission is to help startups and local businesses launch and grow! BNT will host a free Robotics and AI Startup Showcase at the conference at 6 pm on May 10th, including free access to the networking reception on the Exhibit Floor from 5-6 pm. Register here!

Project Updates:

Clean Slate

• Not recruiting new members at the moment.
• A lot of testing.
• Testing Framework

Police Data Trust

• Website coming soon!
• User testing

Mattapan Mapping

• Working through the mapbox storytelling scrolling map (vanilla js) and connecting it with offramps to the more interactive and exploratory map (react)

Legislative Testimony

• Busy with beta this week!
• Not recruiting new members at this time.