Our Work

Current Projects

The following initiatives are currently underway and accepting contributors. Projects are open to volunteers of all skillsets - if you're interested, just show up at one of our Tuesday evening hack nights!

Home Energy Analysis Tool

Residential heating accounts for over 15% of greenhouse gas emissions in Massachusetts. Transitioning from fossil-fuel heating systems to heat pumps is a key step in the state’s overall decarbonization strategy, but appropriately sizing heat pumps is critical to realizing their full decarbonization benefit. This project involves moving a calculator tool from an Excel spreadsheet into a web application to improve the workflow of volunteer Heat Pump Coaches and later make the tool more accessible to the public.

Code Repository
Lead
Thad Kerosky

Massachusetts Platform for Legislative Engagement

This project endeavors to produce a digital public space wherein Massachusetts constituents can share their expertise, stories and opinions on the legislation that shapes our lives.

Code Repository
Lead
Matthew Victor
Slack Channel

Urban League Heat Pump Accelerator

Through this project and its grant, the Urban League plans to hire folks to engage in outreach to homeowners in traditionally underserved communities so they are aware of and can access incentives and resources to convert their HVAC to environmentally friendly air source heat pumps. This will help the Commonwealth reach its goals in the Massachusetts Clean Energy and Climate Plan. It will also reduce the cost of heating and cooling homes for residents in these communities, keeping more of their money in the community and reducing reliance on volatile natural gas or home heating oil prices.

Code Repository
Technologies
Ruby on Rails, React, Python

National Police Data Coalition

We’re building a national index of police incidents. We connect journalists, social scientists, and criminal and civil rights lawyers to allow them to access injustice data across state lines in one shared location.

Code Repository
Lead
Darrell Malone

This project is now launching our effort to aggregate data from multiple partners:

  • National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
  • Measures for Justice
  • Fatal Encounters
  • Texas Justice Initiative And many more…

Sampler of Completed Projects

You can view all the projects we've ever done on GitHub.

Identified a problem in your community?

Maybe Code for Boston can help and we can address that problem together. You can submit a problem statement to our core team using the button at the bottom of this page. Before you submit, please make sure your submission is in line with our few ground-rules below.

How we take on new projects

  1. We prefer submissions in the form of problem statements. A good rule to start with is to phrase your idea in the form of:
    "How might we (thing you want to change here)".
    For example: "How might we better enable citizens to be knowledgable about local political issues" we consider a good problem statement, but "Let's build an iOS app to track how people use parks in our community." we consider to be a poor problem statement. The reason behind this, is that we want to avoid starting from a point where we have already made many assumptions about the project. Who knows if an iOS app is the best choice, and what problem are you trying to address by tracking people's opinions?
    If you already know what you want and you just need it built, we're not the group for you - we do not do "spec work" by any means.
  2. The project must be open-source for its entire lifetime. If this is code, it means freely available on github. If it isn't code, this means that the progress and deliverable 'thing' is openly available in some other accessible way.
  3. The project must solve a real civic need (while there are plenty of good ideas out there, we limit ourselves to civic tech related, social good projects). We realize this is a somewhat fuzzy distinction, which is why we always will have you discuss your problem statement/idea with Code for Boston core team members before we commit to anything.
  4. Due to the diverse group of our members, we may not be able to take on projects that are political in nature. Projects focused around things like open-data and transparency are fair game, but projects to support a partisan political effort are 'iffy' at best. (i.e transparency tool for campaign finance is good, website promoting a candidate is a no-go).
Submit a project idea