codingitforward/cicdemoday2021

Introduction

The Civic Innovation Corps is a first-of-its-kind internship mobilizing the next generation of technologists to create civic impact in cities and states across the country. 2021 marked the program’s inaugural year of placing software engineering, data science, product management, and design students at three state and six city host offices.

We are grateful to our host offices who provided our Corps members the opportunity to serve and grow this summer:

Meet the 55 young technologists who served in our inaugural cohort: Introducing the 2021 Civic Innovation Corps Members

This repository features the slides that Corps members presented during their respective end-of-summer presentations at their host offices. View a recording of Coding it Forward’s virtual end-of-summer celebration, with keynote remarks from D.J. Patil, the former U.S. Chief Data Scientist.

About the Corps Members

Kindly note that if a Corps member's biography does not have a link, their work is not publicly available or they presented their accomplishments during a panel discussion.

Ada Zhou is a graduate student at Stanford University studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the State of California's Office of Digital Innovation with fellow Corps member Marisa Weidner. They worked across various digital sites and services serving Californians in a product management capacity. Together they helped push forward the momentum for researching user needs on the flagship ca.gov site - interviewing over 24 Californians and surveying thousands, planned sprints for the interdisciplinary and interdepartmental team working on the new Cannabis Control Department site, and laid groundwork for a project to redesign the state agency and employee directory. | Presentation

Albert Zhang is a rising senior at Harvard University studying Art, Film, and Visual Studies. This summer, he worked at the New York City Department of City Planning’s Planning Labs redesigning NYC's zoning maps to be color-blind friendly. His final product was a newly designed High-Contrast mode that made Planning Labs’ color-dense maps much more readable to color-blind users. | Presentation

AJ Nadel is a rising junior at Stanford University studying Urban Studies, Computer Science.

Alex Santangelo is a rising junior at Syracuse University studying Industrial & Interaction Design. This summer, she worked with the New York City Department of City Planning’s Planning Labs to update the user interface of their Zoning and Land Use Application website, adapt it to a mobile platform, and to make the site more accessible for visually impaired users. She used Figma to create graphical solutions to these issues and got feedback from users, and then created an executive summary for the engineers to implement the solutions. | Presentation

Andi Halim is a rising senior at the University of California, Berkeley studying Data Science.

Annie Phan is a graduate student at the University of Chicago studying Computational Analysis and Public Policy.

Antonio Jordan is a rising senior at CUNY City College of New York studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked with the City of Boston’s Citywide Analytics team creating an overtime dashboard for the City's Property Management department, with the goal of predicting future spending and implementing a pre-approval process for overtime. | Presentation

Anya Dunaif is a graduate of the University of Chicago where she studied Biological Sciences with a Specialization in Microbiology. She is also a recent graduate of Fullstack Academy where she studied Software Development. This summer, she worked at the New York City Mayor's Office of the Chief Technology Officer on a project called Landing Page as a Service. It is a customizable landing page template designed for NYC agencies to easily set up their own static website. The website is accessible, mobile responsive, and includes multilingual support. | Presentation

Ava Nordling is a rising senior at Northeastern University studying Experience Design. This summer, she joined the four-person Service Design Studio at the New York City Mayor's Office of Economic Opportunity. She conducted exploratory interviews, delivered robust cultural research synthesis, and crafted representative language for a website documenting the inaugural "Designed by Community" fellowship. Ava shared that creating iteratively throughout the summer combined her deepest passions of communal visioning into a living practice, and grew her design mind exponentially. | Presentation

Britney Johnson is a third-year Ph.D. student at the Georgia Institute of Technology studying Human-Centered Computing. This summer, she worked at the New York City Mayor's Office of the Chief Technology Officer (MOCTO) where she served as the Product Manager for two products: Landing Page as a Service (LPaaS) 2.0 and the Feedback Module. The LPaaS 2.0 product provides clients with an easier way to create their own landing pages, and the Feedback Module provides visitors of city agencies' websites with a way to directly send feedback. | Presentation

Bryson Oar is a recent graduate of the University of Utah where he studied Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the Utah Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget using React to revitalize and enhance an older budget management application. The enhancements streamlined and structured the entire process by which agencies track and report performance measures.

Calvin Chen is a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley where he studied Computer Science and Data Science. This summer, he worked at the Los Angeles Mayor’s Data Team analyzing the City's awarded procurement opportunities for the past 5 years and determined if there were inequitable trends between disadvantaged businesses, minority-owned businesses, and women-owned businesses versus businesses that were none of these categories. From building a pipeline from Salesforce to Tableau, his team determined that there was a great discrepancy between the awards granted by the City to these different business types by NAICS code, and listed several recommendations for how the City might combat these inequities for the future. | Presentation

Carolyn Wang is a rising sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley studying Computer Science and Political Economy. This summer, she worked as a software engineering Corps member at the City of Boston's Department of Innovation and Technology. She coded over 10 components to replace and decommission legacy applications, ultimately providing greater internal efficiency. Her project increased user accessibility and significantly improved the public's experience with resources and services.

Chithra Anand is a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley studying Computer Science. This summer, she served as full stack technical lead developer of a team of 5 interns to develop a web app using Javascript/React, HTML/CSS, Firebase that leverages modern NLP, cloud, and computational law techniques to dynamically store, access, and release police records to the public at the San José Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation. She implemented an advanced fuzzy search functionality using Python NLP libraries. The project was acquired by the City of San José to deploy the app for use by 1 million+ citizens, to encourage greater law enforcement transparency.

Daniel Wilson is a graduate student at the University of Toronto studying Cognitive Neuroscience. This summer, he worked at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity on a project that involved creating a web app which replicated and extended the information from the Office’s annual Poverty Report. As, currently, the report is only released as a pdf the goal was to make the information contained in the report more accessible, dynamic, and extensible with interactive plots and downloadable data. | Presentation

David Dodds is a recent graduate of Lambda School where he studied Data Science and Machine Learning.

David Stansbury is a recent graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School where he earned his Masters related to Technology Policy. This summer, he worked at the Utah Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget where he managed the development of a new performance measures portal built into an existing budget management application. To this end, he conducted interviews with nearly 60 stakeholders including government analysts, policy organizations, the media, and legislators, to inform every aspect of the new portal and its future.

Fatima Irfan is a recent graduate of Wellesley College where she studied Data Science. This summer, she worked at the City of Boston’s Department of Innovation and Technology assisting with the No Tow project, which aims to help Boston residents receive appropriate guidance about street cleaning and car towing. She provided user insight and answered questions throughout the design consultation process.

Geunhee Lee is a recent graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she studied Urban Studies and Planning. This summer, she worked at the City of Boston’s Department of Innovation and Technology to understand immigrant communities' information connection behavior and information needs for their longer establishment. | Presentation

Hailee Hove is a recent graduate of San Diego City College where she studied Graphic Design & Interaction Design. This summer, she worked at the City of Boston’s Department of Innovation and Technology on an icon system for the Boston 311 App. | Presentation

Hannah Chu is a rising sophomore at the University of California, Los Angeles studying Linguistics. This summer, she worked at the San José Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation. Her project aimed to create a web portal for constituents of the City of San José to view public San José Police Department (SJPD) records. The goal was to increase transparency and build community trust by improving SJPD compliance with SB 1421, California's Right to Know Act.

Hugo Salas is a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy studying Computational Analysis and Public Policy. This summer, he worked at the City of Boston’s Citywide Analytics Team leveraging 311 data from the City of Boston to understand the dynamics of citizens' demands before and after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Particularly, using the text of each requests' description, he used Natural Language Processing to categorize each case into a topic that could easily be streamlined into a department. | Presentation

Hunter Thompson is a recent graduate of the University of Chicago where he studied Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity utilizing workforce data for New York City to create a data story for the about to be released workforce data portal. This data story explored how equitable job placements were around New York City. | Presentation

Irene Tang is a graduate student at the University of Chicago studying Linguistics. This summer, she worked with the Los Angeles Mayor’s Data team. Following the City’s 2021 migration of procurement data into a Salesforce database, her team assessed the City’s social equitability in choosing business partners--the first attempt to do so in over 20 years! Critically, they found that disadvantaged-owned, minority-owned, and women-owned enterprises tended to win lower-value contracts. They also found that the City contracts with a lot of businesses headquartered outside LA County (and even outside California) -- but this was justified because for many industries in which the City needs work done, there were not enough local businesses that specialize in that industry. | Presentation

Ivy Li is a recent graduate of Yale University where she studied Architecture (Design). This summer, she worked at the Utah Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget designing a completely new performance measures portal used by the Utah government and soon to be open to the public.

Janet Chu is a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati studying Professional Writing and Data Analytics. This summer, she worked with the City of Austin’s Data & Technology Services, Austin Transportation conducting user research to identify target users and prioritize product features for the Mobility Project Viewer, a public-facing dashboard that serves as a one-stop-shop to view all ongoing mobility-related projects citywide. This was accomplished through secondary research, 1:1 stakeholder interviews, and ideation workshops. | Presentation

Jasen Lo is a recent graduate of Minerva Schools at KGI where he studied Data Science. This summer, he worked on multiple projects at the San José Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation (MOTI). He worked on the MOTI communications team on various partner projects to feature the work that MOTI is doing. He also worked on data engineering projects for the San José 311 non-emergency hotline application ticket analysis pipeline. Additionally, he worked on the opportunity housing impact assessment. | Presentation

Joey Headley is a recent graduate of Williams College where he studied Physics. This summer, he worked on a project with the City of Boston’s Citywide Analytics Team which involved replicating the logic and functionality of a web app made for the City of Boston called the RentSmart App into a Tableau dashboard. The purpose of the RentSmart dashboard is to enable users to search for any residential property in Boston available to rent and display all the violations associated with that property within the past 3 years. Over the course of his project he leveraged PostgreSQL to format the data into a form suitable for Tableau data analysis and carried out multiple forms of data visualization and analysis in Tableau to create the new dashboard. | Presentation

Jorge Gabitto is a recent graduate of Code the Dream Bootcamp where he studied Full Stack development. This summer, he worked at the City of Austin's Data & Technology Services, Austin Transportation. He worked on migrating the department’s website from create react app to Next.js. Next.js is a React framework that allows react pages to be rendered server side which allows for better performance, load times, and improvements in SEO. | Presentation

Juliyen Davis is a graduate student at Parsons School of Design studying Transdisciplinary Design. This summer, he worked at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics conducting a review of the Recovery Data Partnership. He interviewed users to understand how MODA could improve agencies' experience with data products.

Kara Siegel is a rising sophomore at Harvard University studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the New York City Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer on a feedback module that can be placed at the bottom of any NYC government sites so that users can easily share feedback about their experience on the site. All information will automatically be parsed via Microsoft Flow so that site administrators can view the information via a spreadsheet or an email. | Presentation

Karen Chen is a rising senior at Harvard University studying History of Art and Architecture (Design Studies). This summer, she worked at the New York City Department of City Planning’s Urban Design Office on The Streetscapes for Wellness interactive which is a proof of concept for making static drawings more engaging for the general public. It features camera animations and scene navigation to allow viewers a more in-depth and exploratory way to understand visuals, supplemented with text to create a narrative. | [Presentation](Karen_Chen_Lucas_Gelfond_Rudransh_ Dikshit.pdf)

Kevin Zhou is a rising sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at Miami’s Department of Innovation and Technology.

Lucas Gelfond is a rising sophomore at Brown University studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the New York City Department of City Planning’s Urban Design Office on an interactive viewer to explore and move through the 3D version of the Department of City Planning's Dimensions of the City project. | [Presentation](Karen_Chen_Lucas_Gelfond_Rudransh_ Dikshit.pdf)

Maha Hussain is a rising senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studying Statistics with Business and Spanish minors. This summer, she worked with the Los Angeles Innovation Team (i-team) on packaging and cleaning data, and building maps. The culmination of her work was a vaccine outreach helper displaying all of the vaccine, case, mortality, and testing data and resources regarding COVID-19 in one place.

Maita Conchita Navarro is a rising senior at Wellesley College studying Media Arts & Sciences, a combination of Computer Science, Studio Art, and Art History courses. This summer, she worked as a software engineering Corps member at the New Jersey Office of Innovation. She contributed to improving the experience of prospective small business owners through the Business First Stop initiative. | Presentation

Mariana Haro is a rising junior at Harvard College studying Computer Science and Government. This summer, she worked on a project at the City of Boston’s Department of Innovation and Technology that consisted of taking design components from the City's website to add them to their design system for easy future use.

Maria Milosh is a graduate student at the University of Chicago studying Computational Analysis and Public Policy. This summer, she worked at the New York City Department of City Planning’s Regional Planning team on housing data in the NYC region. She collected housing data from various sources and conducted visualization and analysis of housing activity that has taken place over the last 40 years. | Presentation

Marisa Weidner is a graduate student at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. This summer, she worked at the State of California’s Office of Digital Innovation as a product manager for the development and launch of an MVP feature for the California Cannabis site. The feature is a campaign toolkit for media assets for California Cannabis campaigns that will improve the user experience and increase downloads of media content. | Presentation 1 | Presentation 2

Matt Crittenden is a recent graduate of William & Mary where he studied International Relations and Data Science. This summer, he worked at the New York City Department of City Planning’s Data Engineering Team piloting a data ecosystem using Google Cloud Platform to enhance access, collaboration, and analysis when working with data at NYC Planning. Cloud-based tools will provide storage and processing capabilities which exceed existing data infrastructure at the agency. | Presentation

Max Kwass-Mason is an incoming graduate student at Columbia University where he will study Computer Science and History.

Megan Demit is a graduate student at Maryland Institute College of Art studying UX Design. This summer, she worked with the City of Boston’s Department of Innovation and Technology’s Digital Team. She helped build a cloud-based design system for designers, developers, and partners working on projects for the City of Boston. This project built upon previous work the City had done creating a patterns library for UI developers, and will continue to evolve to improve design to development handoffs. | Presentation

Michelle Liu is a rising sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University, studying Information Systems and Computer Science. This summer, she worked as a software engineering Corps member at the New York City Mayor's Office of the Chief Technology Officer, developing an embeddable feedback module widget that enables user research and feedback processes across NYC agency websites. | Presentation

Miriam Shamash is a rising junior at Tufts University studying Computer Science & Engineering Psychology.

Regina Joy Alcazar is a recent graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation where she studied Urban Planning. This summer, she worked on a project that addresses the ongoing eviction crisis in the City of Los Angeles by evaluating the effectiveness of the early financial distribution of the COVID-19 Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) to provide policy and data analysis recommendations for future program implementation. As of August 2021, the preliminary evaluation of the allocation of ERAP funds, designed a framework for understanding who accessed the application to apply for rental assistance, and identify neighborhoods where ERAP relief was still needed.

Renoj Varghese is a recent graduate of the University of Connecticut where he studied Digital Media & Design. This summer, designed digital and print products to communicate transportation policy to land developers and consultants at the City of Boston’s Department of Innovation and Technology. He created and tested a prototype that allowed land developers and consultants to submit their strategies to meet Boston’s transportation standards. | Presentation

Rudransh Dikshit is a rising junior at Texas A&M University studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked as a software engineering Corps member at the New York City Department of City Planning’s Urban Design Office to design a REST-API to track sun position data and helped design an algorithm to calculate the roof pitch of buildings in New York and assess for solar potential. | [Presentation](Karen_Chen_Lucas_Gelfond_Rudransh_ Dikshit.pdf)

Ryan Bushman is a senior at Utah State University studying Statistics. This summer, he worked at the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene’s Center for Health Equity and Community Wellness, creating numerous data visualization tools using Tableau. The intent of the project was to assess the performance of the agency’s By My Side Birth Support Program over time. The project is accompanied by a user guide for those unfamiliar with the software. He also conducted a quality-control analysis of the data collected by the program.

Saiful Islam is a rising senior at The City College of New York studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the New York City Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer on the LPaaS 2.0 which stands for Landing Page as a Service. It will be used by NYC agency representatives to spin off their own landing pages for their new services, documents, or other ideas they wish to release to the public. Through this project, content editing is made easier and money is saved. | Presentation

Sandra Zavala is an undergraduate student at University of California, Berkeley studying Data Science and Applied Mathematics. This summer, she worked with the Los Angeles Mayor's Data Team and contributed data analysis for the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Analysis. She also worked on evaluating the Los Angeles Emergency Rental Assistance Program's first phase by using an index to measure the allocation of financial distribution.

Silky Agrawal is a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy studying Computational Analysis and Public Policy. This summer, she worked with the City of Boston’s Citywide Analytics Team. The City of Boston recognizes the importance of data quality checks for its datasets published for public use. Any non-standard and unautomated checks lead to delayed knowledge of such data quality issues amongst stakeholders. Therefore, the team wanted to have an automated data quality check process embedded in their workflow which would directly inform stakeholders of data quality issues, if any and take immediate corrective measures before the data is released to the public. Silky worked on creating a pipeline that helped automate data quality checks for one of the datasets for the Department of Inspection Services. | Presentation

Spencer Simon is a graduate student at the University of Chicago studying Data Analytics. This summer, he worked at the New York City Department of City Planning’s Data Engineering Team on improving data access and usability using Google Cloud Platform to build out an enhanced data ecosystem for the agency. He demonstrated this enhanced data ecosystem in action by analyzing the impact of zoning changes on the built environment in New York City. | Presentation

Starasia Wright is a recent graduate from CUNY Hunter College with a double Bachelors of Arts in Computer Science and English with a Linguistics and Rhetoric Concentration. This summer, she worked at the Utah Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget creating and populating the database for a new performance measures portal used by the Utah government.

Yoseph Ghazal is a rising senior at the University of California, Irvine studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics adding a new set of documentation to assist the tech team with understanding their data sets and pipelines. He created tracking sheets and pipeline diagrams throughout his 10 weeks.

Yvonne Tram is a recent graduate of the University of Southern California where she studied Business Administration and Applied Analytics. This summer, she worked at San José’s Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation. Opportunity Housing refers to enabling multi-unit housing on properties with a Residential Neighborhood General Plan land use designation. It explores allowing up to four units per parcel (for example, a mix of a single-family home, duplex, triplex, or fourplex. esidents based on properties within a ½ mile radius from transit versus those citywide. Her project entailed an impact assessment on the housing, renting, and lot size situation of current residents based on properties within a ½ mile radius from transit versus those citywide. | Presentation

Contact

Please contact corps@codingitforward.com with any questions.