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Overview

The Brigade Project Index is a collaborative effort involving core contributors from across many brigades.

We design, develop, and maintain a set of tools and practices for mapping out all the work being done on projects across the entire global network of civic hacking organizations and Code for America brigades.

Our core goal is to publish a rich and constantly-updated database of projects that any number of network projects can use as a data source to help us get better connected.

This tool collects data about civic tech projects crawling Github or other projects repositories (as provided by civic tech organizations)

More about the Index and the Statusboard

The index is the dataset we suck everything into. The statusboard is a tool for browsing the index that’s been designed around helping brigade’s assess their index status (hence it doing things like showing checkmarks for key details being filled in). The idea with the statusboard was for it to evolve into a one-stop-shop for brigade leaders and members to see how well their projects are indexed and where the gaps are.

The reason for this layered approach was that we wanted to focus on collecting really quality data that could be distributed across the network for a variety of tools and uses. This way, there’s a much stronger value prop for brigades to publish their projects into the index–it doesn’t just feed one tool/site we’re building, but a whole ecosystem of brigade network tools that anyone can add to. There are a couple other tools out there using the index in addition to the statusboard.

Next enhancements

How to Get Involved

  • Tag your projects on github!
    • Make sure your brigade’s projects are listed in the index (instructions)
    • Using the github “Topics”, tag your project directly in github with #code-for-america and your brigade tag (e.g. code-for-sf). Then include any relevant topic tags from this list.

Resources