This is a two day event, Saturday, June 4th, and Sunday, June 5th. We encourage you to attend both days if you can!

Don’t call it a hackathon. Sure, there will be code and wireframes, along with plenty of tasty snacks. But this time we’re also bringing empathy, collaboration, and community-driven design to civic hacking. You won’t want to miss this new, people-centered direction for Code for San Francisco. Here are some photos from last year's event.

Join Code for San Francisco, CivicMakers, and over 100 passionate, action-oriented community members for a weekend of translating San Francisco problems into workable, impactful solutions. This year, we’ll be focusing our full attention on users — citizens, residents, community members — and diving deep to discover and define their problems to best understand how we can help. There will also be a range of skill-building activities taught by experts and designed to help civic hackers and their projects be effective and impactful.

We’re looking for hackers and doers of all kinds to join us — not just developers designers, but City & County staff, community activists, and people on the street who want to improve our neighborhoods. Real people. Real problems. Come for the community, meaningful work, and good times... stay for the free food and non-alcoholic beverages.

Agenda

Parallel tracks are delimited with a pipe ( | ). Subject to changes.

Saturday, June 4th

8:15 AM - 9:00 AM Check-in and breakfast
9:00 AM - 9:10 AM Welcome
9:10 AM - 9:45 AM Activity: Who are we?
9:45 AM - 10:10 AM Speaker: Eric McDonnell, EVP and COO of United Way Bay Area
10:10 AM - 10:30 AM Activity: Project lifecycle
10:30 AM - 11:00 AM Project pitches and weekend agenda
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Project Kick Off
12:00 PM - 12:30 PM Lunch
12:30 PM - 1:45 PM Project time | Skill building workshop
1:45 PM - 3:00 PM Project time | Skill building workshop:
3:00 PM - 3:15 PM Break
3:15 PM - 4:30 PM Project time | Skill building workshop
4:30 PM - 5:00 PM Report back and debrief

Sunday, June 5th

8:15 AM - 9:00 AM Check-in and breakfast
9:00 AM - 9:10 AM Welcome
9:10 AM - 9:45 AM Activity: What do we care about?
9:45 AM - 10:15 AM Speaker: Nicole Sanchez, VP of Social Impact at GitHub
10:15 AM - 10:45 AM Project pitches
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Project Kick Off
12:00 PM - 12:30 PM Lunch
12:30 PM - 1:45 PM Project time | Skill building workshop
1:45 PM - 3:00 PM Project time | Skill building workshop
3:00 PM - 3:15 PM Break
3:15 PM - 3:45 PM Project wrapup
3:45 PM - 5:00 PM Report back and debrief

Skill building workshops:

What the heck is civic tech?
Time: Saturday 12:30
Presenter: Jesse Biroscak
Are you new to the brigade and wondering what the fuss is about civic technology? Then you'll want to attend this presentation and open discussion about what civic tech is, what others around the world are doing (or aren't), and trends in the philosophy of how we can affect meaningful change in our communties.

Best practices for maintaining an open source repo
Time: Saturday 12:30
Presenter: Trent Oswald
A language-agnostic run-down of community-centric best practices in regards to publishing and maintaining open source projects. Will cover documentation, licensing, contributing guides, codes of conduct, moderation, and overall project management..

Github for non-developers
Time: Saturday 1:45
Presenter: Jesse Szwedko
In this workshop we will cover how to use Github (and a little git) to keep a track of file changes as well as how to use Github as a project management tool. Audience is non-developers who are interested in learning how to better collaborate.

Community-centered design with Caravan Studios
Time: Saturday 3:15
Presenter: Anna Jaeger
Caravan Studios will present their community-centered design process, starting with identifying the nonprofit need, progressing through our design process that integrates community members and ultimately, to technology solution and use. Their approach focuses on discovery, grouping and selection of ideas that will become technology interventions for the community-identified problems. The process incorporates a feedback loop and multiple iterations into the development cycle, and builds user engagement into the entire development roadmap.

Introducing Superpublic!
Time: Saturday 3:15
Presenter: Lawrence Grodeska and Jesse Biroscak
Superpublic is a first-of-its-kind innovation lab bringing public, private and nonprofit sectors together to solve urban problems. Superpublic partners will develop products and services with the involvement of Bay Area communities to ensure real impact. Initial focus areas include mobility and transportation, digital government services and performance based-procurement. Join members of the founding team from City Innovate Foundation, SF Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, 18F and the General Services Agency to learn about Superpublic and discuss how Code for San Francisco can contribute to developing civic solutions for our cities.

Introduction to version control with git
Time: Sunday 12:30
Presenter: Jesse Szwedko
This workshop will be a deeper dive into version control using the git command line client. Attendees will learn the basics of committing changes, branching, merging, viewing history and much more.

End-to-end guide to user research basics
Time: Sunday 12:30
Presenter: Jane Davis
This workshop will cover how to develop lightweight research plans for both exploratory and evaluative research, including creating research goals and discussion guides, and recruiting participants. It will also go over conducting rapid analysis and how to distill findings into easily communicable formats. It's an end-to-end guide to the basic elements of user research, designed to give people enough of a grounding that they can walk out the door and start doing research themselves.

Markdown and documentation for your code
Time: Sunday 1:45
Presenter: Trent Oswald
Writing documentation is definitely an art! We'll be covering how to leverage Markdown, a widely-used markup language for fast and easy documentation, to empower your project with easy-to-read and easy-to-maintain docs. We'll also cover some doc-assisting skills: screenshots, screen recordings, how to make an animated gif, and more!

User acquisition for civic tech
Time: Sunday 1:45
Presenter: Jacob Sills
Building impactful civic tech products is hard. You have to navigate a wide variety of stakeholders and end-users (including the government) with differing challenges, incentives and rules. Too often people have great ideas but fail to penetrate their target market because they have difficulty translating their vision or MVP into a widely used product. In this workshop, we'll cover a variety of different strategies to acquire customers or partners in order to lock-in your product / market fit and help your product scale. This is a great opportunity to learn about a variety of customer and / or partnership acquisition strategies if you have an idea, as well as an opportunity to collaborate with each other on a project's acquisition strategy that you're working on.

This is a no-alcohol event.

FAQs

Are there ID requirements or an age limit to enter the event?

All ages! If you're under 18, you will need a parent/guardian to attend with you while at Microsoft Reactor.

What are my transport/parking options getting to the event?

Muni: 8, 12, 30, and 45 lines

BART: Montgomery / Powell (nearly equidistant)

Street parking available (Saturday meters!)

Where can I contact the organizer with any questions?

Chat with us on Slack (it's easy!) in the #NDOCH channel: http://c4sf.me/slack

Is my registration/ticket transferrable?

Yes. Contact the organizers.

Terms and Conditions

We claim no ownership of any intellectual property rights over the Content that create during the National Day of Civic Hacking. Any intellectual property rights in the Content belong solely to you (or your licensors). However, you grant Code for San Francisco a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual and irrevocable right to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, sublicense, and prepare derivative works of such Content. You represent and warrant that you have sufficient rights to grant this license.