Date:Â January 23, 2018
Venue:Â McKinsey & Company
Presenter: David is a collaborator with the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship and a data scientist at Toronto based tech company Polar, where he leads and executes the organization’s data analysis and statistical learning projects.
Presentation: David discussed key insights from a recent report from the Brookfield Institute, in partnership with Stack Overflow, titled Stacking Up: A Snapshot of Canada’s Developer Talent. The report shines a light on a growing and increasingly important segment of Canada’s tech economy: software developers
Presentation Deck:Â https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FAHobb1uEeVdcfK2rRg7uVXAjKpcNUyu/view?usp=sharing
https://twitter.com/CivicTechTO/status/955955538524766213
https://twitter.com/CivicTechTO/status/955957938744676352
https://twitter.com/CivicTechTO/status/955958755769901057
Announcements:
- Toronto Transit ExplorerDescription of project: Toronto Transit Explorer. I’m an engineer at Sidewalk Labs – we made an app to visualize Toronto transit.What we need: we’re looking for feedback and ideas for stuff you’d like to build on top of something like this!Come talk to me to check out the demo and lend your thoughts and ideas.samara@sidewalklabs.com
- FREE Public Health documentary: Unseen Enemy (CNNFilms)All are invited. Audience will be health folk and gov reps, global citizens (Global Citizen org is co-hosting event), etc. They would love to get some civic tech people there as they’ll be talking about Canada’s role and general government preparedness for global health events.Date: Wed, Jan 24 @ 7-10pm (TOMORROW)
Location: TIFF Bell Lightbox
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsB1sYSHEAM
Tickets: http://bit.ly/unseen-enemy-tix - Code Across 2018 – WE NEED SOME FUNDRAISING HELP!Hi Everyone! We are planning Code Across 2018 and we’re looking for someone to join the partnerships team as a finance and research associate who can give us 2-5 hours per week to assist. The work would be done remotely, and start date would be asap. This would be an opportunity to gain fundraising experience and work on making sure Code Across is the best event it can be!Kindly let @arjungupta @alex. (on Slack) know if your interested- thanks!
Project Pitches:
| Project | Lead(s) | Description / Needs |
| Civic Tech 101 | Andrew | Go to the back room —> There will be a board game! Go with Andrew (guy in the hat)! |
| Budgetpedia | Jim | Description of project: Bringing transparency, understanding, and wisdom to Toronto’s budget: it’s a mess!
What we’re doing today: Contacting journalists and pitching to them What you need: Writers, researchers, ux designers, front and back end developers, people interested in giving feedback on budgetpedia Keep in touch: budgetpedia.ca |
| CodeAcross 2018 Planning | Alex | Hackathon planning for Code Across 2018 on March 3 at TPL.Â
What we’re doing today: I’m helping with the fundrasing team |
| Bike Parking | Jake | Description: A webapp which will allow cyclists to drop a pin on a map of Toronto indicating insufficiencies in bike parking infrastructure. We believe that the most valuable data to improve Toronto’s bike parking will be crowdsourced. What we’re doing today: Discussing our survey, sprinting towards our MVP! What we need: Developers, Designers, Researchers, Data Analysts, Communicators |
| TTC Subway Dashboard Project |  Raphael | Transit agencies are bad at communicating successes and failures: leaving users with most salient experience in their memory: their worst one By communicating transit performance in a way that users understand, they might better appreciate how good transit is while understanding why it’s bad when it’s bad and then. Build the political will to improve transportation. Been scraping a bunch of subway data from the TTC, still working on processing data Looking for: Data geeks, A logo https://github.com/CivicTechTO/ttc_subway_times |
| Law and Design Team | Avery | Improving access, usability of legal information. There is an access to justice crisis!
Need: User researchers, graphic designers, website builders, anyone with interest in legal issues |
| Women and Colour | Mohammed | What we’re doing tonight: Working on the project! What we need: Javascript developers (React + Sails) for website development Digital marketers for speaker engagement Community managers for partnership outreach Bonus: Person good with grant applications to apply for OTF grant Womenandcolor.com |
| TheCarded.ca | Sharky | We are Human Centered Design (HCD) platform that simplifies for organizations and community professionals to track their efforts and work in conjunction with policing policies.
What we’re doing: User testing for resources and changes to some policies |
| Chalmers Cards | Zach | Description: Chalmers Cards are laser-cut wooden handouts that explain how to access public resources for folks in tight financial situations. Stuff like toll free numbers for shelter referral, financial aid registration, and free legal aid.
The cards are laser cut onto wood so the information doesn’t get crumpled. Plus people think they’re cool so the cards don’t get lost! These cards have been a real hit! I’m having trouble meeting the demand for these in the shelters on my own, so I’m looking for folks to help out with laser cutting them! What we need: |