Every Tuesday evening, citizens meet at Civic Tech Toronto to collaborate on projects aimed at finding solutions to civic challenges.
Listed below are a snippet of the projects you can contribute to.
VoteBetterBETA
At VoteBetter our mission is to help students and student representatives alike navigate the landscape of student campus politics, form a collective voice on the issues they care about, and effectively organize for advocacy and change.
Lead: Stephanie Cheung
Slack: #proj-vote-better
DemocracyKit Launched
DemocracyKit is an open online platform to share advice and technology with campaign teams running for municipal office, available at democracykit.org. DemocracyKit is published by the Open Democracy Project which works to empower everyday citizens to drive change through civic and political action.
Lead: Chris Cowperthwaite
Slack: #democracykit
Wild Combination Launched
Civic Tech Toronto and Connected Lab partnered to create a special edition of Wild Combination, a rapid ideation card game where participants apply technologies to real-life scenarios to create novel solutions for people.
Lead: Marc De Pape
Slack: #wild-combination
Women and Color Launched
Find talented women and people of color available for speaking opportunities at tech-related events in Toronto.
Lead: Mohammed Asaduallah
Slack: #womenandcolor
Budgetpedia Launched
Making the City of Toronto budget more accessible, to promote informed debate.
Lead: Henrik Bechmann
Slack: #budgetpedia-gen
Bike Space Alpha
Bike Space Project aims to improve Toronto’s bike infrastructure. The project is working on a tool that will enable cyclists to identify places where there is not enough bicycle parking.
Leads: Jake Miller
Slack: #proj-bikeparking
Toronto Meshnet Alpha
Meshnets are highly distributed, redundant intranet networks. A series of nodes, usually fashioned from cannibalized routers, emit signals that create a free self-contained and self-reliant network thatโs accessible to any internet capable devices within range. We are dedicated to the growth of free-to-use wireless Internet access in Toronto’s public and publicly accessible spaces.
Leads: Benedict Lau, Garry Ing, Dawn Walker
Chat: #tomesh
Toronto Councilmatic Alpha
The purpose of this project is to create a beautiful citizen-controlled website that tracks all things related to City Council: the legislation introduced and passed, its various committees and the meetings they hold, and the councillors themselves.
Lead: Patrick Connolly
Slack: #councilmatic-toronto
City of Brains Project Experiment
The purpose of this project is to develop an understanding of how people access mental health services in Toronto, to share those stories to help others find their way to help, to identify common challenges in those stories, and then, design and develop technology solutions to support people in overcoming those challenges.
Lead: Mark Freeman
Slack: #city_of_brains
Free the Electorate Experiment
Ontario election results are posted on the Elections Ontario website, but generally aren’t readily available outside election cycles, when the information is in the press. Poll-by-poll results are available as pdfs and spreadsheets back to 2007, and prior to that only basic election results are published online. We want to make this data more easily available by creating a set of standard documents and a database, as well as visualizations of that data for public use.
Leads: Peter Rose, Ann Catton
Slack: #freetheelectorate
Citizen Data Portal Experiment
The purpose of this project is to create a community-managed platform that will collect all Toronto datasets in a single place, whether they originate from official city sources or from citizens.
Lead: Patrick Connolly
Slack: #data-portal