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nicksuch edited this page Dec 17, 2014 · 6 revisions

Welcome to the openlexington wiki!

OpenLexington volunteers are citizen engineers, professional software developers, analysts, artists, designers, students, and concerned residents. Some people give back to their community by building houses, serving food at soup kitchens, and tutoring kids after school. We do those things, too, but we also use our skills to build technology-based solutions that help make our community a better place.

You can contribute, too! Lend your talents to build something meaningful and useful.

Communicating

  • Website - basic info about our group is here
  • Email List - use this for announcements and routine group conversation.
  • Meetup / Events list - this is where we'll announce all our meetups and events.
  • Twitter - we'll announce things here, and @-mention us to share notable civic technology projects publicly
  • Gitter - use this for quick internal chat, and things like linksharing during events

Roles

  • Captain(s): volunteer who starts and/or leads a local Brigade community
  • Delivery Lead: should have a working knowledge of all the projects being hacked on at a given time in the Brigade.
  • Community Organizer: responsible for recruiting and welcoming new members to the Brigade and helping them get oriented.
  • Storyteller: focuses on telling the stories of the Brigade’s impact in their community.

You can find more on the Roles here.

Onboarding

So, you want to hack with us? Here are a few things you can do to get started:

  1. Join our Email list
  2. Come to a Meetup
  3. Join our GitHub Organization
  4. Select a project or issue that interests you
  5. Talk with any current project members or the Delivery Lead
  6. Build stuff, have fun!

How you can help

There are lots of ways you can help with the Brigade, and writing code is but one of many skills that we need. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

If you like talking with people

  • Meet with Urban County Councilmembers to discover needs throughout Lexington
  • Connect with community organizations like Lexington Health Department, LexTran, and Fayette County Public Schools to identify challenges where the Brigade can help

If you like talking with computers

If you like to write

If you like designing things for humans to use

  • Improve the UX and visual design of our civic apps
  • Create promotional materials to grow group membership, encourage usage of our civic apps, and to welcome community members to our events

If you like to make maps