Season’s greetings! Check out this review of our 2023 activities.

This year we focused on three main activities:

The Code for America transition affected us in concrete ways, such as fiscal hosting and technology, and in more abstract ways, such as our identity. On November 1, we voted to adopt the name Code with the Carolinas, reflecting our aspiration to code with, not for, the communities our projects impact. On November 29th, we selected a new logo to go along with the new name.

Bridging identity and technology, we also launched a revised website at codewiththecarolinas.org. We also migrated our Google Workspace from Code for America to Open Collective, and are now reachable by email at [email protected]. For us, the fiscal hosting transition was straightforward, as we returned to Open Collective July 1. We are still working on updating our name and contact information throughout a multitude of systems. If you see something out of date, please help us get it right.

The technology transition has also given us an opportunity to refine our processes. We are especially pleased with how we have built on the work started at the Write the Docs Atlantic Writing Day to draft the Inclusive Codeberg Pages Process for Informal Teams (licensed under CC BY 4.0). This process allows volunteers with a wide range of web development skills–ranging from the rookie to the rusty–to help maintain our website. Volunteers who have learned coding independently especially appreciate this as a gentle introduction to collaborative coding.

Our Open Sidewalks project is a partnership with the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology. Volunteers use their Tasking Manager software to map pedestrian accessibility features of Downtown Raleigh, bringing OpenStreetMap data up to the Open Sidewalks data standard. We are seeking a local partner to host an AccessMap. To help engage potential partners, we shared information about the project at the Raleigh Mayor’s Committee on Persons with Disabilities, at RaleighForward, and as a post on the DTRaleigh blog.

Open Sidewalks projects have two phases: crossings and sidewalks, each involving both mapping and validation. We have mapped 100% of the Downtown Raleigh crossings and validated 60% of them, with a goal to complete validation by the end of the year. We have also mapped 18% of the sidewalks phase.

Our Zoning Atlas project is a partnership with the National Zoning Atlas (NZA). We have committed to complete the jurisdiction work for North Carolina and South Carolina. In fact, we have collected the jurisdiction data for all 553 jurisdictions in North Carolina and have imported it into the NZA’s Editor. NZA staff are now completing zoning code and geospatial analysis. We also make this data available as an open dataset published on Zenodo. 

For South Carolina, we have collected jurisdiction data for 277 jurisdictions. With the help of a volunteer who has an urban planning and software development background, we have recently committed to develop complete atlases for some jurisdictions in Greenville County, SC. This is an exciting opportunity for us to engage with the end-to-end Zoning Atlas process! For both states, we continue to work on lists of zoning districts and uploading zoning documents and maps into the Editor.

Outreach is also part of our Zoning Atlas project. Thanks to a number of contacts in Western North Carolina, we have presented our Zoning Atlas work to representatives of Land of Sky Regional Council, Just Economics, and Success Equation.

Over 60 volunteers have contributed to our projects, approximately evenly divided between Open Sidewalks and Zoning Atlas, with some volunteers contributing to both projects. We operate as a remote-first hybrid organization. Our regular schedule involved weekly work session alternating between projects, biweekly community meetings, and biweekly informal coffee chats, all online. To strengthen relationships among volunteers and with the community, we held an in-person Meet and Greet at the Raleigh Downtown Farmers’ market, located within the area we mapped for Open Sidewalks. 

In addition to Write the Docs, volunteers also represented the organization at the Code for All Summit and HackTheHackathon 3.

In terms of budget, we continue to be thrifty. Our only expenses have been insurance ($106.25), technology (Meetup, $138.50; domain, $9.16), and reimbursing two volunteers’ registrations at Write the Docs Atlantic, where they hosted our Writing Day project and were also able to attend conference sessions on software documentation.

In addition to what we did and how we spent money, in this update we are also asked to address the challenges we faced this year.

The main challenge we faced was the end of Code for America 's support of the Brigade Network. For a small, all-volunteer organization like ours, starting up during the pandemic disruption, the administrative workload of this transition was sometimes an unfortunate distraction from the work we would prefer to be doing.

Throughout, we have learned to embrace our identity as a civic tech volunteer organization that emphasizes inclusion, accountability to communities, and partner-first projects. We also began to situate our organization in relation to earlier work of civic tech volunteer organizations in our region; the movement to build with, not for; and the statement of purpose that came out of the Network ReVisioning process: "Our mission is to use technology for the people, in service of a more equitable and just world." 

For the Open Sidewalks project, we hope to map Uptown Charlotte and perhaps other Carolinas communities. For the Zoning Atlas project, we expect to complete jurisdiction work for North Carolina and South Carolina and to complete full atlases for at least a handful of South Carolina jurisdictions. We maintain a list of potential future projects and look forward to starting a couple of new partnerships in the coming year. We are currently scoping a potential partnership with Sunshine Labs to evaluate the potential for expanding the Council Data Project in the Carolinas. 

While the civic tech volunteer landscape is full of uncertainty, we look forward to a year full of opportunity to have an impact on our communities!