The Civic Hacker Podcast

This episode features Channing Nesbitt, who is the co-founder of the Tableau Foundation’s Racial Justice Data Initiative, and led the team driving the Racial Equity Data Hub.  Channing shares his experiences in these roles and what he has learned from their work to empower users of varying backgrounds to leverage data in combating systemic racism by advancing equity in education, economic opp...

Today’s episode features the founder of Karmalize, the world's first and only online directory of socially responsible businesses, searchable by social cause, and completely crowdsourced from people who care about making a better future. After a 30+ year career in the consulting, technology, and software industries, today’s guest, Rich Yap, turned in a corporate career for a different mission: to...

The U.S. Census Bureau open data is a key ingredient in important civic tech projects and policy advocacy work. In this episode we get to hear directly from a Census Bureau expert, Lia Bolden, as she answers questions from the Civic Hacker Network members and demystifies the new data being released after the 2020 census.  Lia shares with us specific tools and features that make it easy to acc...

In this episode, you will listen to Matt Scott who leads storytelling at Project Drawdown which is the world’s leading climate solutions resource project. Matt is also the creator of inclusive impact storytelling project Let's Care, and the film 20’s and Change: San Francisco. He shares with us his expertise and exclusive knowledge that he has learned throughout his career in the digital space. Li...

Today we speak with Rachel Brown who is the Founder and Executive Director of Over Zero, an organization that merges research and practice to prevent identity-based violence and other forms of group-targeted harm. She shares with us how communication can be a weapon for identity based violence, and how Over Zero aims to counteract this harmful communication. Rachel also provides many strategies an...

In today’s episode we get the opportunity to hear from Alexandra Pittman who is the founder and CEO of ImpactMapper and HERO Index. She shares with us how ImpactMapper facilitates change measurement for a variety of organizations by helping them to understand and effectively use both qualitative and quantitative data to support social causes in areas like gender equality, human rights and more. Li...

In today's episode we hear from Hugo Seureau who is the CEO and co-founder of Essteem. We learn about their unique approach to hackathons that led to the invention of the “Equalithon”, as well as their mission; to connect people, start-ups, nonprofits and a variety of companies in the technology industry with the goal of improving business performance while simultaneously implementing specific str...

In today's episode we speak with Anthony Starks, an independent developer and designer interested in data visualization, combining Art+Code and building open-sourced tools such SVGo (SVG generation), deck/decksh, and dchart. He gives us empowering information on the ways that we can use data as a tool for advocacy, and advice and examples for those of you that are interested in building your own d...

Today’s conversation is with Allen Hillery who is the Co-Founder of Be Data Lit, a platform that promotes education for data literacy advocates, and a co-creator of the surprise data visualization sensation, the “DuBois Challenge”. He takes us behind the scenes of the challenge and leaves us with the clear message that data literacy is for everyone. Link to Allen's Summit Page: https://civichacker...

This episode is being released in January, which is Human Trafficking Awareness Month, so we are featuring a conversation from the original Civic Hacker Summit that focused on innovative tools designed to help law enforcement build cases against trafficking rings using data gleaned from the web. Civic Hacker Network Director, Lori McNeill, discusses the history, context and outcomes of a US Defens...

We recently hosted a webinar titled, “Impact Blockers: 4 mistakes standing between you and the change you want to see”. This BONUS EPISODE features the audio from that webinar. If questions about the impact of your work make you feel like a deer stuck in headlights, you're not alone. So many people working to create change in their community aren't sure about whether or not they're getting the out...

Today's episode features a conversation with Rebecca Rumbul, Head of Research at mySociety, a U.K. based not-for-profit organization that helps people be active citizens using civic technology, research and data across 40 countries. mySociety’s research team seeks to discover what works — and what doesn’t — when it comes to civic technologies. In this conversation Rebecca shares some of her resear...

For Episode 05 of the Civic Hacker Podcast, "AI for Good", we are featuring a conversation with Friederike Schüür to talk about how we can use data and AI for good, AI capabilities and ethics considerations, and some simple concepts that can help you make a bigger impact in your civic and social good projects. At the time of this recording, Friederike was a data scientist with the applied machine...

In Episode 04 of the Civic Hacker Podcast, "Hacking Food Insecurity", we sit down with Tim Yoon to talk about his winning National Day of Civic Hacking project, and the journey that followed to develop the idea into a working tool on the Sacramento Food Bank and Family Services website.  This conversation was part of the Civic Tech Group Showcase track of the Civic Hacker Summit. In it, Tim k...

This week we are joining in the international celebration of GIS technology by bringing you a very special GIS-focused talk from the Civic Hacker Summit Archives, "3 Questions You Can Answer With Maps". This session was presented by Esther Needham, Project Manager on the Data Analytics team at Azavea, a certified B Corp that applies geospatial analytics, software, and research for positive civic,...

Amy Bach founded Measures for Justice in 2011 as a follow-up to her acclaimed book  Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court.  The book won the 2010 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and was succeeded by an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times titled Justice by the Numbers. In this episode of the Civic Hacker Podcast, hear more about this organization and their ambitious plans to collect and...

How much do you know about how to get people experiencing homelessness into housing and connected with appropriate resources? In this episode of The Civic Hacker Podcast, hear inspiring details about the data-driven solution to homelessness being advanced by the Built for Zero program from Community Solutions. Their Deputy Director of Data and Performance Management takes us through Built for Zero...