Our Work
Current Projects
The following initiatives are currently underway and accepting contributors. Projects are open to volunteers of all skillsets.
Get Water Wise Buffalo
A website for low income residents to apply for financial assistance on their Buffalo Water bill. This project was launched through the 2019 Code for America Community Fellowship.
Buffalo Mutual Aid Website
The Buffalo Mutual Aid Network is a social action group for peer-to-peer organizing, humanitarian assistance, and reliable information sharing developed in response to the COVID-19 crisis.
Former Projects
Traffic Stop Data Monitoring
Buffalo police data on traffic stops is not made public, so the Fair Fines and Fees Coalition and Code for Buffalo created a webpage for motorists to monitor their interactions with the police.
City Auction Map
An interactive map of the 2018 city auction lots to help PUSH Buffalo identify strategic nearby lots.
Identified a problem in your community?
Maybe Code for Buffalo can help and we can address that problem together. You can submit a problem statement to our core team using the button at the bottom of this page. Before you submit, please make sure your submission is in line with our few ground-rules below.
How we take on new projects
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We prefer submissions in the form of problem statements. A good rule to start with is to phrase your idea in the form of:
How might we (thing you want to change here)"
For example: "How might we make it easier for residents to apply for a social safety net program" we consider a good problem statement, but "Let's build an iOS app to track how people use parks in our community." we consider to be a poor problem statement. The reason behind this, is that we want to avoid starting from a point where we have already made many assumptions about the project. Who knows if an iOS app is the best choice, and what problem are you trying to address by tracking people's opinions?
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The project must be open-source for its entire lifetime. If this is code, it means freely available on GitHub. If it isn't code, this means that the progress and deliverable 'thing' is openly available in some other accessible way.
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The project must solve a real civic need (while there are plenty of good ideas out there, we limit ourselves to civic tech related, social good projects). We realize this is a somewhat fuzzy distinction, which is why we always will have you discuss your problem statement/idea with Code for Buffalo core team members before we commit to anything.
- Due to our tie to Code for America, and the diverse group of our members, we may not be able to take on projects that are political in nature. Projects focused around things like open-data and transparency are fair game, but projects to support a partisan political effort are 'iffy' at best. (i.e transparency tool for campaign finance is good, website promoting a candidate is a no-go).