The Austin team partnered with the city to build applications and advance open government initiatives like increasing data portal usage. They completed projects like Prepared.ly for wildfire preparedness and hosted events like hackathons. Going forward, the city is continuing open data efforts and formed an Innovation Office thanks to the groundwork laid by the fellowship in strengthening Austin's civic tech community.

1. Year-End Report: AUSTIN
Team Members:
Joe Merante,
Emily Wright,
Aurelio Tinio
City Partners:
Doug Matthews,
Matthew Esquibel
OUR APPROACH IN AUSTIN
Austin proposed to partner with Code for America to produce lightweight creative technology to
further empower the city as a platform for community engagement. The fellows were in a unique
position in Austin because of the burgeoning civic tech community, open government efforts by
the city council and administration, and a recently-launched city data portal and open source
web site.
The fellows completed a five week residency in Austin, consisting of nearly 100 meetings with
city departments and community stakeholders, hosting and attending events, and building proj-
ects to begin leading by example. Collectively, they’ve returned nearly a dozen times, each time
with a new story, project or opportunity. Whether hosting hackathons, participating on a SXSW
panel, giving “cloud” workshops to city staff, drafting open data policy, or much more, our fellows
have delivered.
Our work in Austin organized into three categories: building applications, advancing open gov-
ernment initiatives and strengthening the civic technology community to further participation
in local government. We’ve made connections that never existed, opened doors for citizens and
city employees, written lots of code and demonstrated the power of the open web for a more
engaged, participatory government of the people.

2. PROJECTS: focus on Prepared.ly
Prepared.ly
http://prepared.ly
neighborhood awareness, wildfire preparedness, city-citizen dialogue, open data, community surveys, notifications
Prepared.ly is a simple way for you to stay informed and proactive about the ongoing threat
of wildfires. As Austin’s rapidly growing population—more than 20 percent in the last decade—
seeks new frontiers along the city’s many greenbelts, the need for information for “wildland
urban interface” inhabitants is constantly increasing since these areas present a greatly increased
risk of wildfire. The Austin Fire Chief emphasized the high demand for prevention education
during a meeting with the Fellows, especially in light of the devastating wildfires in neighboring
Bastrop County in 2011.
It became clear that we could help make sense of the often confusing array of available check-
lists and public resources. After surveying citizens, teaming with neighborhood captains,
and working with the Austin Fire Department and Texas Forest Service, we officially unveiled
Preparedly on July 19, 2012.
Here’s how it works:
• It pulls in data feeds for weather conditions like humidity and
wind speed and direction, to get the current wildfire risk for
your address. It also includes current burn ban information
for your address, as well as “Red Flag” warning notifications.
• There is a comprehensive list of tasks that are specific to
WUI neighborhoods rated by their difficulty from “easy” to
“super-star.” Users have the ability to skip a task, accept it,
or “do it later” which will schedule a reminder via text or
email. Both users and the fire department can submit tasks,
or comment on them with resources and/or experiences.
• It also provides homeowners with an easy way to get in touch
with the Austin Fire Department and ask questions or seek
assessment for their home or neighborhood.
With Prepared.ly, we’re helping citizens help themselves and
providing a direct connection to government when the circum-
stances require. We’re not just concerned with how govern-
ment functions, we want to change how communities interact,
making society, not just government, better. For the fire de-
partment, Prepared.ly provides citizens an entry point to the
range of available materials and goes beyond a one-way push
of information. For citizens, it’s an improved interface to public
service announcements. For the community, it helps alleviate
the difficult and immediate decisions that firefighters have to
make in emergencies.
Since it’s launch in July, over 800 accounts were created and
700 wildfire prevention tasks “completed,” and a very receptive
welcome from both AFD and homeowners.

3. prepared.ly
prepared.ly
prepared.ly
prepared.ly
p r e p a r e d . l y
p r e p a r e d . l y
PROJECTS: prepared.ly screenshots

4. PROJECTS: continued
City Petz: Stray Mapper stray.citypetz.com
A way to help the Austin Animal Services Department improve
their ‘return to owner’ rate, by allowing owners who recently
lost their pet to quickly and easily see if the local shelter has
their animal. We established a process with staff member Erik
Victory to export data which contains the locations of where
animals were picked up to be sent to the app on a continual ba-
sis. These locations were then mapped and presented with ad-
ditional information to the user in order to facilitate and speed
up the process of retrieving their animal when contacting the
shelter. Stray Mapper is part of a larger effort, City Petz, which
aims to help the Animal Shelter better deal with capacity issues
at their facility.
Open Gov Initiatives
Fellows worked with the city’s data portal team to develop strat-
egies for increased data portal usage within and outside of the
city. They brought the data and procedural needs of developers
to departments, many of whom posted new data or agreed to
review their internal processes. Mid-year, we produced detailed
recommendations to the Open Government Working Group, an
advisory group drafting an open government policy at the di-
rection of the City Council. Our efforts are part of the larger
open government picture in Austin: the 2013 fiscal year budget
includes funding for an Austin Innovation Office.
Sheltr austin.sheltr.org
An app to help find food, shelter, medical and other human
needs services in Austin by providing a search interface and
map displaying walking, driving, or public transportation direc-
tions, along with the ability to find resources by type and re-
ceive text messages and email of locations. Based on the Sheltr
app built at RHoK Philadelphia in 2011.
ATX Floods atxfloods.com
“Turn around don’t drown!” This map, co-implemented and up-
dated by the Watershed department, shows which low water
crossings are open or closed during flash floods. This should
make it easier to get the word out about crossings’ status so
people can plan accordingly. It should also serve as a vessel for
Twitter feeds to the public and streamline reports from Water-
shed to Homeland Security Management.
Art ATX artatx.com
Redeployment of an app developed by a fellow last year using
data from the city’s Art In Public Places collection. It’s a work in
progress as we coordinate with the city to have the art listings
hosted on the city’s data portal, so that the app can continue to
have an up-to-date public art data source. This is similar to the
recently deployed Honolulu Public Art Finder.

5. EVENTS
Reception at the Highball
Council Members Laura
Morrison and Chris Riley
arranged this meet-and-greet
for city employees, members
of Open Austin and others.
Code Across I and II
We hosted two hackathons,
on February 25 and
September 8, which brought
over forty attendees each.
City employees participated
in both events. Work on some
of the projects continues,
others have served as
examples of the power of
open data and engaging the
civic technology community.
Projects worked on during
these events include:
• Find It
Enter an address and find
Austin city services nearby.
• Good Sect, Bad Sect
Prototype crowdsourced
bike safety app to alert
riders about dangerous
locations.
• Gardenmate
Pair volunteers with avail-
able plots in community
gardens. (ongoing)
• CycleNearby
Find bike infrastructure
around Austin. (ongoing)
• Aunt Bertha
Austin company worked
on a mobile redesign using
new APIs.
TEC Filer
An open source system for
filing campaign finance
reports required by the Texas
Ethics Commission. (ongoing)
Brigade Launch Party at
Austin City Hall, SXSW
On March 12 we launched
the Austin Code for America
Brigade with presentations
by city officials and Code
for America. The Brigade, in
conjunction with Open Austin,
is a key initiative for carrying
our work forward.
Cool Like You, Gov Private
Sector Envy
March 13. Aurelio and
Emily participated on this
panel exploring how
government technologists
deal with the demands of
meeting customer needs in a
world where private industry
sets the pace. and whether
government ever be as
cool as their corporate
counterparts.
Random Hacks of Kindness
(RHoK) Austin
Joe led a small group at this
June 2 hackathon to produce
Sheltr app featured above.
Austin Forum
On September 4 at this
monthly gathering of
intellectual leaders, the
Code for America booth
served as a resource for
interested community
members to get involved
in our activities.
TwilioCon
With fellows from other
teams, Emily will present
Digital Democracy: Engaging
Citizens One SMS at a Time
at this conference bringing
together over 1,000
developers in October.
UXWeek
With fellows from other
teams, Emily hosted a
workshop: “Designing for
Civic Action: A Collaborative
Design Session with Code
for America” tackling
usability problems across
cities, with Prepared.ly
and Austin AFD featured
as a positive example.

6. PRESENTATIONS
February 15
Austin Emerging Technology
Commission
February 8, March 14 Austin
Community Technology and
Telecommunications
Commission meeting
February 28
Austin City Council
Staff members of Bazaar
Voice Austin (2/17), Google
Austin (2/22), Twilio
San Francisco (5/9)
In addition, the fellows
attended dozens of events
during their residency and
return visits, including TEDx
Austin, Edward Tufte’s Data
Visualization Workshop, and
SXSW mixers.
QUICK WINS
SXStreets
Using Google Custom Maps to
show road closings during the
SXWX festival, instead of the
pdf’s on the city web site,
this map of festival street
closings gained over 4,600
views. http://bit.ly/sxstreets
People’s Gallery App
A simple mobile app guide to
the art on three floors of
Austin City Hall, along with
form to Tweet comments
on each piece. Tweets were
displayed on screens around
the venue on opening night.
http://artatx.herokuapp.com/
#cfaATX
The fellows have
encouraged use of hashtag
#cfaATX since the
beginning of the year,
generating hundreds of
Tweets during residency in
February alone. We began
archiving them at http://atx-
tweets.herokuapp.com/
Team Newsletters
Through September, eight
newsletters highlighting
activities, events and open
government news have been
sent to a list the fellows built
from 0 to 340 subscribers.
It has served as a constant
source of conversation in
meetings and on return visits.
Archives available at
http://codeforamerica.org/
austin.
Deep Dish ATX
This redeployment of a CfA
Chicago app shows restaurant
scores in Austin using data
from the city portal.
deepdishatx.herokuapp.com
Software workshops
with CTM
In February, and again
in August, fellows led
sessions with the city’s
Communications and
Technology Management
department web team about
Agile software development,
cloud computing and
deployment best practices.

7. GOING FORWARD
The Austin team has accomplished their 2012 mission to spread the “Code for America Effect.”
As a city partner recently noted, “The CfA Fellow residency, in particular, was an especially eye
opening experience—it brought a lot of the concepts and ideas we had been pushing for years
into focus for a lot of people. It energized City staff and the community around the principles of
transparency, efficiency and collaboration--and that has been invaluable.”
The examples highlighted in this report were accomplished in the context of the city’s transition
to an open source web site, building and promoting use of an open data portal, increasing publicity
around these activities, use of web tools to gather citizen feedback, growing civic technology
community and much, much more. A city commission has drafted recommendations for a citywide
open government and data directive and in September, the City Council approved the formation
of an Innovation Office in the 2013 budget.
The fellows’ work with Austin this year was truly a partnership, though they also served as
developers, consultants, advisors and leaders. They worked with departments across government,
created connections between developers and the city, and integrated the Code for America
Brigade into these activities. Local leader Chip Rosenthal was chosen as Brigade Captain for
Austin and as of this writing, has already hosted an open gov meetup and drafted an outline for
2013 open gov priorities. Austin’s ubiquitous technology scene is growing closer to government
thanks to our work, and the city’s historically engaged communities of interest are using new
tools and techniques to make sure the momentum continues toward a fully open, participatory
city government.