GovLaunch: Code for America’s “Change By Us” Initiative Released in Philadelphia

This week, Code for America launched the “Change by Us” initiative in Philadelphia. Change By Us allows citizens to share ideas, projects and resources to dive change in their cities and neighborhoods. The falls under a free and open license, so it is available for any city to pick up and implement.

The Code for America blog stated:

In Philadelphia, today, Mayor Michael Nutter announced the public launch of “Change By Us: Philadelphia” — which not only constituted a significant advance for civic engagement in the city, but also marked a important step forward for the reuse of civic software in the country: the civic engagement platform initially deployed in New York is now available for any city to use under a free open source license. Change By Us’s reuse shows the opportunity for shared civic software.

This is just another example of the incredible work Code for America is doing for cities across America. The code for Change By Us can be found on Github. To help turn the ideas citizens provide into tangible changes in the community, the Knight Foundation has provided up to $25,000 in grants which will be awarded to some projects submitted. The Code for America blog post also reports:

Jeff Friedman, the city’s Manager of Civic Innovation & Participation and our lead sponsor in the city, concluded, “With the advent of powerful and sophisticated open source Internet-based tools like Change by Us, Philadelphia, New York, and other cities have the opportunity to unleash the full potential of positive, constructive, collective action.”

Great project, cool idea – let’s hope to see it replicated across the country.