Presented a summary of my 2012 Code for America fellowship experience at a Code for Japan meetup.

1. Rob Brackett
[ブラケット・ロブ]
2012 Code for America Fellow, Chicago

10. 

12. 

15. 

19. The spec has problems.
• Unclear what things are optional (in reality: everything)
• Lots of room for different cities/implementations to work differently
• Open311 is about customer service; the city is focused on operations
• Date problems — formatting, time zones
• No paging
• No searching
• No provision for how to show extra/custom data
• No way to show detailed progress
• No way to handle “follow-ons”

20. The spec has problems.
• Unclear what things are optional (in reality: everything)
• Lots of room for different cities/implementations to work differently
• Open311 is about customer service; the city is focused on operations
• Date problems — formatting, time zones
• No paging
• No searching
• No provision for how to show extra/custom data
• No way to show detailed progress
• No way to handle “follow-ons”

24. Track your explorations.
http://blog.apps.npr.org/2014/09/02/reusable-data-processing.
html

28. Have a use case.

30. Share your work.

34. Make it easy for others to participate.
http://opensourcedesign.is/blogging_about/import-designers/

38. Good READMEs
• Quick and clear description
• A screenshot (seriously)
• Easy setup instructions
• Contribution instructions
• Recommended bugs to work on

40. Be nice.
• Respond to bugs and PRs quickly (even if just to
say you can't get to it right away)
• Always use a friendly tone
• Be encouraging and constructive; don't say
what's wrong, suggest how it could be better
• Say thank you!

41. Side Projects

44. Community Projects

53. ありがとうございます！
Rob Brackett
rob@robbrackett.com
@mr0grog
GitHub.com/mr0grog
flickr.com/mr0grog
!
servicetracker.cityofchicago.org
github.com/codeforamerica/srtracker
http://dev.cityofchicago.org