The Fellowship in Kansas City

The Fellowship is Code for America’s best known program and consists of a one-year residency placing developers, designers, and researchers within local governments. Over the course of the program, Fellows and local governments to work together to build apps, foster new approaches to problem solving, and tackle social issues that have a significant impact on the community.

In 2013, Code for America’s fellows Andrew Hyder and Ariel Kennan teamed up with Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, Mayors’ Offices to understand new opportunities for economic development. Working with city officials including Ashley Z. Hand (CIO of KCMO) and Brett Deichler (Director of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County) the fellows conducted 62 meetings with hundreds of community members. In all of those sessions, a common theme emerged: many of the city’s beneficial public projects were being done in silos with little sharing of resources or information across diverse stakeholders.

To further understand the community, the fellows hosted two roundtable meetings inviting close to 200 community representatives from the business community, NGOs and city government. The fellows also participated in events such as Hacking the Gigabit City, CityCamp KC and Hack Kansas City. The Hack Kansas City event attracted 80 participants and led to the the creation of the Code for America Brigade.

Based on findings from the Google Digital Divide Study on Kansas City the Fellows concluded saw that adults without web skills and internet access are at a clear disadvantage in completing tasks necessary to the establishment of a successful business. The fellows began developing a technology solution aimed at improving the digital life skills of entrepreneurs and those seeking to enter the workforce.

The resulting product was BizFriendly — a content-driven portal that helps business owners learn new skills and market to their customers. The program combines step-by-step lessons with dynamic feedback and social learning. Presented to KCMO and KCK as a minimum viable product in April 2013, the app continues to add new users and lessons.

Code for KC Brigade

After the fellows’ work was completed in KCMO/KCK, the Code for KC Brigade was established to continue the work of civic innovation. An active network of nearly 500 civic hackers working on a variety of open-source projects for community good, Code for KC has its own page on this website and can also be found at codeforkc.org.

2016: The Fellows Return

In January 2016, Code for America fellows returned to the metro to work with the Kansas City, Mo., Health Department on a project to ensure every school-age child meets their immunization enrollment requirements for their school. The team of Rachel Edelman, Jessica Cole, and Kevin Berry will spend the next year developing a digital tool allowing individuals to search and access their own immunization records and receive reminders about upcoming immunization requirements. The project will consider the technology access barriers that the target population faces and ensure that the digital tools are feasible for their use. This tool will also aim to improve school record keeping so that vaccine preventable disease risks become known and preparation can take place. Overall, these features will improve the efficiency of the local Health Department so that they can focus on an array of necessary services. In developing the project, Code for America and Kansas City will also investigate how immunization services can help people get more general information about health care enrollment.