Brigade Unwrapped: A memorandum of 2023

[tyliec]

Introduction

👋 Hello, reader. It is I, Tyler Chong. If you've been involved with the brigade in any way this past year we've probably bumped into each other. Maybe you were unlucky enough to have me as your onboarding buddy, or maybe you were suckered into participating by me into a hilarious holiday party game. Either way, I hope your interaction with me was somewhat positive 😅

I've been apart of the brigade for about 2 years now, as I regularly started to attend meetings back in January 2022. Over this course of time, I've (completely unelected) become one of the main organizers of the group. Whenever I think about how in the hell that happened, I am reminded of the adage: Decisions are made by those who show up.

One thing I've thought was always missing in the brigade is some form of reporting. While things may be slow going (we operate on volunteer labor, how fast can you ask us to go?), we do good work... eventually. But if we don't write down the good work we have done, did we really do the work? 😄 Being as I am one of the main organizers, it falls on me to be the change I seek. As such, I will do the honors and kick off with this post what will hopefully be a series of quarterly/annual reports? We shall see.

As part of this, I'd like to shoutout the volunteers who helped in some way or form this past year (If I missed you in this list, I am sorry. I promise I appreciate your contribution, and I will add you to the list if my brain starts working again):

@avenmia @lprimiano @Scott Allen @kmal808 @Hooobot @ggordn3r @kcoronel @franciscocha @dinoboy197 @l7ana @Alexandra-Haynes @MichaelTamaki @kobebuckley @DerekMalone @bentut @jonathanswilcox @MichelleShuey @kenz-bee @Luany Leone @sthapa @Adalovelox @johnkmzhou @Bytemarks

And all the other @CodeWithAloha/civic-innovators, I hope you all know we couldn't do it without you.

Noting the difficulties

Difficulties you say? Other than the never ending dread of feeling like we could be doing something else that's more fun or more beneficial for ourselves? 😆

As I'm sure you know, there are many challenges specific to civic tech. Conceptually - we deal with challenges that affect huge amounts of people (quite literally, government is for everyone) over large amounts of time (very often their entire lifetimes). This concept leads to the many of the difficulties we face with engagement. Many come into and join the brigade seeking to do good, only to find out that civic tech is anything but quick, or easy. All that to say that if you've stuck it out for a decent period of time, many kudos to you. 🍾 Putting this into words that might make more sense, we try and balance two things here: showing what's possible and doing whats necessary. The first is fairly quick (with a timeline of days - weeks), but the second (which is debatably the most impactful) takes much longer (months - years).

While I say this, I don't want to discourage people that haven't been able to be consistent/regularly attending members. Since the problems and projects we take on take enormous amounts of time, it is normal that you probably won't be there for all of it (life happens). I want to explicitly say that you should not feel like you have disappointed anyone for not showing up, and that you are always welcome to pop into a meeting whenever you are free (we love seeing you, even if it's been a while).

Celebrating Our Wins

Showcasing some of our wins over this past year:

We've held 45 Meetups

Reference: https://www.meetup.com/code-with-aloha/events/?type=past.

Over the past year, we've been meeting almost every Monday—some online, and more recently some in person. Thank you to The BoxJelly and the Entrepreneur Sandbox for letting us use their spaces to meet, it is much appreciated. We finally made it out the Zoom call!

BoxJelly

Entrepreneur Sandbox

Participated and presented at the 2023 Hawaii Annual Code Challenge

This past HACC, a team organized within the group took on the Hawaii Pacific University Center for Marine Debris Research (CMDR) – Large Marine Debris Reporting, Dispatching & Documenting Platform challenge. Great work @Hooobot and @Alexandra-Haynes when presenting, we shall get it next time!

Codebases:

• https://github.com/CodeWithAloha/Ocean-Watch
• https://github.com/Alexandra-Haynes/ocean-watch-hacc23

Presenting at HACC2023

Demo Picture

Team Picture

Went on a few group field trips

Places:

Hawaii Plantation Village

Hoʻomaluhia Botanical Garden

Waikiki Sunset Cocktail Cruise

Holiday Party at Side Street Inn w/ UXHI, AI Hawaii, and Honolulu Tech Network

Survived Code for America Ending Things

Context:

• https://discourse.codeforamerica.org/t/2023-network-announcements-and-reflections/1640
• https://codeforamerica.org/news/reflections-on-the-brigade-networks-next-chapter/

As part of Code for America ending things with the brigade, we had to migrate over existing services and fiscal services to other platforms. Not to mention giving up the "Code for" prefix.

Most notably:

• Semi-rebranding as Code With Aloha
• Moving off the CFA provided Zoom/Meetup
• Moving our account balance to Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/code-with-aloha

Hawaii Zoning Atlas goes live to the public

Marketing Material: Marketing One Pager

Press Release Doc: For immediate release - Hawaii Zoning Atlas Launches to the Public.pdf

The launch of the Hawaii Zoning Atlas to the public was matched with a few news articles, list some in particular:

• https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/the-conversation/2023-08-11/hawai%CA%BBi-zoning-atlas-helps-people-navigate-land-use-rules-and-regulations
• https://www.hawaiifreepress.com/Articles-Main/ID/39670/Hawaii-Zoning-Atlas-Reveals-where-and-how-Zoning-Rules-Limit-Housing-Supply-and-Increase-Costs

"The Hawai‘i Zoning Atlas has made us aware that exclusionary zoning is one of the primary culprits in the affordable housing crisis—causing hardship for individuals, families, and employers across the state." -- Robert H. Thomas (Joseph T. Waldo Visiting Chair in Property Rights, William and Mary Law School, and Director of Property Rights Litigation, Pacific Legal Foundation)

Side Note: Kauai is also soon to come to the Hawaii Zoning Atlas! While all that press is great (and hopefully change comes with it), nothing beats the merch 😊

Stickers

Tote Bags

HIERR runs its first workshops

After many difficulties with standing up the project on a random computer in the state office (not joking), the HIERR project completed it's first pilot engagement workshop a few months ago! Now that we have some data, time to analyze it. Heres to many more. 🥂

HIERR Workshop

Website redesign almost done/deployed

Preview of the new website: https://codewithaloha.github.io/CWAWebsite/

Code Repo: https://github.com/CodeWithAloha/CWAWebsite

Huge kudos to @Alexandra-Haynes for heading this up - can't wait to deploy and replace what we currently have at https://codewithaloha.org/!

Preview

The Path Forward

• Embrace the change to Code With Aloha

If you've heard me talk about the group, you might have heard me reference as either Code for Hawaii or Code With Aloha. Giving up a name is hard, especially one that has been around for so long. As much as I like complaining about Code for America, it is time (maybe just time for me) to accept the new name and embrace our identity as Code With Aloha

Code With Aloha embodies the spirit of inclusivity, collaboration, and the unique sense of aloha that defines our community. It's more than just coding; it's about doing so with a genuine, welcoming, and compassionate approach.

• Project Specific Meetings

If you've ever attended a Monday Meetup, you've probably found it a bit hectic and hard to get work done. One thing we are going to try out this next year are project specific meetings, where people can either be online at the same time or in person together to just do work on the same project (less distractions). To see this in action, you can join us in the next year on Wednesday nights to work on Uipa.org (coming soon to Meetup).

• Continue Our Hybrid Meeting Schedule

We've been meeting more in-person or online on a month by month basis. The rough structure of this is an alternating schedule:

1. First Month - 2 meetings online, 1 meeting in-person
2. Second Month - 2 meetings in-person, one online

We've kept the online meetings on the schedule as some attending members are either not in town, or not on Oahu.

To keep on allowing these members to attend, we will continue this hybrid meeting schedule. This seems to work so far, so we will keep doing this until it stops working.

• Continue Quarterly Brigade Planning Meetings

To keep in theme with this previous year, we are going to continue having quarterly (every 3ish months) brigade planning meetings. One change we are going to make for these meetings is to have more structure to them - by opening the floor and soliciting feedback a week or so before the meeting, that way we can have conversations about improvements that aren't just off the cuff.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I hope this post reminded you of the good times you had with the group (or made you forget about the bad times 😆 ). While the going is tough sometimes I hope we all remember that what we are doing here matters, and if we weren't doing the work - nobody else would. A quote from our website:

Nobody is coming to save us. It's up to us to impact our community and drive change. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

If you have any comments/reactions/feedback, please leave it on this discussion post. They will be read and responded to.... eventually! 🔬

To end on a fun note, let's keep it shakin. See you in 2024!

Noting down some readings here that have highly shaped my thinking. If some of the language/wording in this post seems familiar, it's probably because you read the same things I did!

• Alliance of Civic Technologist's Mission Values Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h-cNQtJrMZi3yaohQIJPMbxh4lnKzUQtI_Vm0ptBExA/edit
• A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide: https://www.amazon.com/Civic-Technologists-Practice-Guide-ebook/dp/B08GZWMGMQ
• We the Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems: https://www.amazon.com/We-Possibility-Harnessing-Entrepreneurship-Problems/dp/1633699196
• We can't wait for someone to save us: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sebastianism#:~:text=Sebastianism%20(uncountable),Brazilian%20people%20as%20a%20messiah.