Project Discovery ¶

All projects in the network index are discovered via an organization that publishes a list of affiliated projects.

Organizations list ¶

organizations.json, hosted in the code-for-america/brigade-information repository, is the authoritative list of civic technology organizations included in the network index.

This repository is moderated by Code for America staff, and open for all to update or add to via pull requests. More information about the organizations.json format and how to contribute to it can be found in the repository’s README.md file

Each entry in organizations.json represents one brigade or other civic technology organization, and can include a projects_list_url declaring where that organization publishes its official list of projects. Several formats are supported, and more could be easily added, so that every organization can participate in the index easily via whatever practice they already use or would like to use to keep stock of projects.

Projects crawl ¶

From organizations.json, the index’s crawler goes through every organization’s projects_list_url to discover projects:

graph TD subgraph CFA_BI["github.com/code-for-america/brigade-information"] ORGS[fa:fa-table organizations.json] click ORGS "https://github.com/codeforamerica/brigade-information" end ORGS --> |Government Team| GH_ORG ORGS --> |Brigade| GH_TOPIC subgraph GITHUB["GitHub"] GH_ORG[(Brigade Organization)] GH_TOPIC[(Brigade Topic Tag)] P5((P5)) GH_ORG --> P6((P6)) GH_ORG --> P7((P7)) GH_TOPIC --> P8((P8)) GH_TOPIC --> P9((P9)) end ORGS --> |Project Hub| WEB_CSV ORGS --> |Brigade| WEB_JSON subgraph WEB["Web"] WEB_CSV[(Web CSV feed)] WEB_JSON[(Web JSON feed)] WEB_CSV --> P1((P1)) WEB_CSV --> P2((P2)) WEB_JSON --> P3((P3)) WEB_JSON --> P4((P4)) WEB_JSON --> P5 end

Tip

When organizations publish projects via JSON or CSV web feeds, they can include projects not associated with any GitHub or other source code repository.

Brigades that document non-code projects can use Google Spreadsheets, static websites, or interactive portals to capture work outside GitHub

Examples ¶

See Contributing / Get your organization indexed for a complete walkthrough on how to get your organization indexed.

GitHub organization ¶

BetaNYC’s official project list is everything under the BetaNYC GitHub organization:

{
    "projects_list_url": "https://github.com/betanyc"
}

GitHub topic ¶

Hack for LA’s official project list is everything on GitHub with the hack-for-la topic tag:

{
    "projects_list_url": "https://www.github.com/topics/hack-for-la"
}

Google Spreadsheet ¶

Civic Tech Toronto’s official project list is maintained in a simple Google Spreadsheet:

{
    "projects_list_url": "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mqLnB55uVv3d1GPJaaW5XeQ7qdmmKqJZVZyLfD9xL_E/pub?gid=0&single=true&output=csv"
}

JSON repository list ¶

Chi Hack Night’s official project list is a JSON file containing a list of only GitHub repository URLs that they publish through a GitHub repository:

{
    "projects_list_url": "https://raw.github.com/open-city/civic-json-files/master/projects.json",
}

Dynamic CSV feed ¶

Code for Philly’s official project list is a CSV feed generated from a database by their interactive projects portal:

{
    "projects_list_url": "http://codeforphilly.org/projects.csv"
}