Replicating Code for America Best Practices
At Code for America we have an opportunity to help both ourselves and others stop reinventing the wheel around best practices in building and running programming like our Code for America Fellowship.
Like any startup organization or nonprofit, challenges exist in documenting stories, case studies, and process documents - not just in a way that’s easily accessible for future members of the organization, but also partners so that they may draw upon our lessons learned and remix best practices in their own work.
At Code for America, we not only partner with local government in the US, but with nascent international groups interested in starting civic tech “Code for ___” organizations in their own countries, as well as with established civic tech endeavors in other countries. These organizations are separate from Code for America but are treated as sister organizations, independent but part of a collaborative network we call Code for All. We teach and learn from each other and make sure all of our work is better because we are connected.
We've begun conceptualizing the resource that would be helpful to the network as a "toolkit," documenting not only stories, but the process and templates by which others can model and/or riff off of for their own purposes. Such a toolkit is often the basis for those members of a network to share back their learnings, and improve the understanding of the overall work.
-An early prototype of a logo for our toolkit
Code for America International Program Manager Lynn Fine and I have been working on such a resource for the past few weeks with the intention of:
answering and meeting international partner's greatest needs around replicating our Code for America fellowship program.
providing an action playbook, from the strategic to tactical level, on how to manage the fellowship program, complete with templates for action.
helping ourselves document our own practices.
Sharing our work in an open source way.
Our project around this is currently in beta, but we're excited to eventually unveil a full working version on the web for input from our community. We're grateful to have incredible partners and to be able to be at the point in our development where we can share our learnings and hope you will join us in building this resource.
