Blog
September 29, 2025
CityCamp Oakland 2025: Residents Gather to Discuss Oakland's Future
CityCamp Oakland returned to City Hall after a long hiatus due to COVID! This year we joined 8 other cities across the country hosting CityCamp. 70 Oakland residents showed up and didn't disappoint!
May 29, 2023
Reflecting on 8 Years of Partnership: OpenOakland and the Public Ethics Commission
On April 4, 2023, Suzanne Doran (Acting Executive Director of the PEC), Michael Ubell and Colin King-Bailey (Open Disclosure project team) shared insights from their years of collaboration. This blog post is a summary of the discussion with video clips from the event!
May 20, 2022
RADAR Program Exploration: Learnings from a Discovery Phase
Last year, several OpenOakland members kicked off a discovery phase for a potential service delivery program to serve local nonprofits. We were looking for ways to reduce project overhead while centering the specific needs of local community groups. Inspired by BetaNYC’s Research and Data Assistance Request (RADAR) initiative, we wondered if something similar might work here in Oakland. Despite wrapping up our discovery phase early due to pandemic life, we wanted to capture our initial learnings...
May 17, 2022
Restructuring OpenOakland
As of May 17, membership unanimously voted yes to empower the Steering Committee to enter Lean Ops mode and focus on restructuring the brigade for greater inclusiveness. Our Lean Ops (lean operations) mode is intended to strip operational tasks down to the very barebones needed to accomplish two core goals...
May 9, 2022
Open through 5/17: Special Member-wide Leadership Vote
Per our bylaws, we are committed to a democratically-controlled brigade that ensures all members have a direct voice in how we operate. With no elected leadership currently on the Steering Committee, this vote offers members a voice in our next steps...
April 3, 2022
Leadership Transition Status: March Steering Committee Recap
OpenOakland is unable to hold an election for brigade leadership, per our bylaws, due to a lack of leadership nominees. The Steering Committee has been working on a contingency plan to address short-term operational needs and long-term structural improvements. We will be putting these to a member-wide vote in the coming weeks...
March 12, 2022
Exploring Structural Change: Feb. Steering Committee Recap
February’s Steering Committee meeting continued to focus on building trust among the group to encourage better communication, and explored upcoming leadership needs in the face of waning engagement...
February 11, 2022
Steering Committee Recap: Dec-Jan
We're a little late with recaps thanks to the end-of-year holidaze. Some unfortunate Twitter trolling upped the urgency in resolving some existing project account management challenges but we identified a path forward that appears feasible to all. We made some exciting progress as we continue to commit to collaborative culture building and brigade strategy, so read on for some community training opportunities...
February 9, 2022
OpenOakland Voices: Tracking Local Legislation
OpenOakland Voices Open Data
Jackson shares the Council Data Project's approach to making city councils more accessible to the public, tracking legislative action, improving inclusion through machine learning and other challenges.
February 8, 2022
Help Oakland Build Better Tech: Join the 2022 OpenOakland Steering Committee
Our all-volunteer collective runs on people power. We’re a nonprofit but unlike most nonprofits, our leadership is elected by OpenOakland’s general membership each year. We’ve gone through a lot of reflection and refocusing over the last couple of years and are so excited to welcome in a new team of Oaklanders to guide our vision as we bridge community and technology for a thriving and equitable Oakland...