Projects
Browse the projects below to see what we’re currently working on. You can filter the list to see past projects, too.
Status definitions | Get involved | Provide feedback
Active
Democracy Dollars
Democracy Dollars is a public campaign finance initiative passed by Oakland voters (Measure W) and rolling out for the 2026 election. This team is prototyping a digital experience for the program and recruiting UX designers and researchers!
Active
openoakland.org
As the digital face of OpenOakland, our website serves new and existing members, community and government partners, and members of the larger Oakland and civic tech communities. The site was recently migrated from a Wordpress install to a static Jekyll site hosted on AWS. The migration focused primarily on moving the codebase, and we now are working on improving site architecture and visual design. Issues in GutHub marked “Good First Issue” are great for first-timers.
Active
Open Disclosure Oakland
Open Disclosure helps Oaklanders understand the role of money in their local politics. By analyzing mandatory campaign finance disclosures for candidates seeking public office, Open Disclosure presents a user-friendly overview of who is raising money, from where, and how much. Open Disclosure is developed in partnership with the City of Oakland Public Ethics Commission.
Project lead
Mike Ubell, Colin King-Bailey, and Suzanne Doran
Connect on Slack
#project-open-disclosure
Active
OpenOUSD
OpenOUSD aims to bring greater transparency to the Oakland Unified School District’s central office so that the community can fully participate in discussions about how it can best serve our students. OpenOUSD is a project of OpenOakland, a volunteer run group with the mission of increasing access to government through technology. OpenOUSD receives no public or private funds and is not an official OUSD website.
Incubating
CityCamp Oakland 2024
CityCamp is an participant-driven “unconference” where city staff and engaged residents can meet and discuss the intersections of technology and local government—how innovative technology and data uses can improve civic engagement, increase efficiency and transparency, and connect residents in our city. The agenda is set based on topics the attendees themselves suggest. We are looking to host another CityCamp in the Fall!
Project lead
John Baldo
Connect on Slack
#event-citycampoakland
Brigade ops
Civic User Testing Group (CUT Group)
Civic User Testing (CUT) Group’s goal is to make sure OpenOakland projects are working towards creating the best possible experience and serve all Oakland residents. If you’re interested in user experience, or just like making things better, please reach out! Check out our most recent projects.
Brigade ops
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Group
The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Group was created in 2016 to codify OpenOakland’s DEI organizational principles and to lead through action, OpenOakland’s commitment to making the technology space representative of Oakland’s diverse and multicultural community. In 2020, it’s become very clear that this foundational shift must extend beyond a single working group. We welcome those who might want to formalize the process through an active working group. In the meantime, please visit us in Slack to connect and continue the work.
Project lead
Open (see Jess Sand)
Connect on Slack
#oo-diversity-equity
Brigade ops
openoakland.org
As the digital face of OpenOakland, our website serves new and existing members, community and government partners, and members of the larger Oakland and civic tech communities. The site was recently migrated from a Wordpress install to a static Jekyll site hosted on AWS. The migration focused primarily on moving the codebase, and we now are working on improving site architecture and visual design. Issues in GutHub marked “Good First Issue” are great for first-timers.
Idle
Open Budget Oakland
Every 2 years the city of Oakland releases a budget in a spreadsheet that has nearly 20,000 rows, which does not make for ideal reading. The mission of Open Budget Oakland is to transform this mountain of data into an interactive display of charts and diagrams that is easy and even fun to use. Our MVP is live, but could benefit from improvements, updated content, and new features.
Idle
Councilmatic
We make the Oakland City Council meetings easily accessible to the citizens of Oakland. Using our site citizens can learn when are the upcoming city council meetings, view the agenda, put the meeting on your calendar, and send an electronic comment to the Council. Plus you can see videos of past meetings.
Idle
Civic User Testing Group (CUT Group)
Civic User Testing (CUT) Group’s goal is to make sure OpenOakland projects are working towards creating the best possible experience and serve all Oakland residents. If you’re interested in user experience, or just like making things better, please reach out! Check out our most recent projects.
Idle
Community Foods
In partnership with West Oakland’s Community Foods Market this project aims to support the adoption and use of food assistance benefits (EBT). The main objectives are to provide support for in-store EBT applications and to improve the EBT checkout process.
Idle
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Group
The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Group was created in 2016 to codify OpenOakland’s DEI organizational principles and to lead through action, OpenOakland’s commitment to making the technology space representative of Oakland’s diverse and multicultural community. In 2020, it’s become very clear that this foundational shift must extend beyond a single working group. We welcome those who might want to formalize the process through an active working group. In the meantime, please visit us in Slack to connect and continue the work.
Project lead
Open (see Jess Sand)
Connect on Slack
#oo-diversity-equity
Idle
LaneLookout
Our project seeks to improve the safety of bike lanes for cyclists in Oakland. We are developing an app to generate aggregate data regarding infringements in the bike lane (ie. vehicles) via self-reporting cyclists. From this data, we will generate reports to drive improvements in problem areas.
Idle
Oakland Gov 101
This project was a partnership with the League of Women Voters of Oakland to add educational content to their site describing the structure and function of local government.
Idle
Oakland Open Data Portal
Since 2011, this platform has served as an open data catalog built by the OpenOakland brigade as a community resource and our first example of what can be achieved using open source tools in strategic ways for our city. This site uses the opensource [CKAN](http://www.ckan.org) platform—the same free software behind the UK government’s [Data.Gov.UK](http://data.gov.uk) resource. This site has been populated with data found on various Oakland government websites and from the huge data warehouse operated by [Urban Strategies Council](http://www.urbanstrategies.org).
Visit site
Project lead
Open
Idle
Oakland Wiki
Oakland Wiki is built on the [LocalWiki](https://oaklandwiki.org/about/) platform, a grassroots effort to collect, share, and open the world’s local knowledge. Anyone can edit this wiki, so contribute what you know about your local community for others to use and enjoy!
Idle
Trash Talk
With East Oakland facing illegal dumping, mostly from outside actors, Trash Talk was envisioned in 2016 as a tool to help neighbors plan and execute cleanups and graffiti removal. The app was intended to help neighbors report issues and work together with the Oakland City Public Works Agency to remove trash, dead animals, and other consequences of illegal dumping in East Oakland neighborhoods. The goal was for Trash Talk to eventually connect with the City‘s existing tracking app, [SeeClickFix](https://en.seeclickfix.com/oakland) for tracking volunteer time.
Idle
West Oakland Air Quality (WOAQ)
WOAQ is a partnership with the nonprofit West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, designed to power WOEIP’s citizen science program. The WOAQ platform helps West Oaklanders visualize neighborhood air quality data collected by WOEIP’s volunteer residents, and use that data to explore the environmental issues that directly impact their health and well-being every day. We could especially use some help with production server configuration, educational program design, and product management.
Project lead
Formerly Robert Soden, Jess Sand, Gabriel Ehrlich, Niels Thorsen
Connect on Slack
#project-woaq
Delivered
Adopt a Drain
Adopt a Drain was a platform for Oakland residents to volunteer to be responsible for keeping a nearby storm drain clear to decrease flooding from storms, protect water quality, and keep trash from storm drains and connected creeks and water bodies. Vigilant maintenance of the City’s storm drain infrastructure is important for reducing pollution in the Bay. Adopt a Drain was set up in partnership with [City of Oakland’s Public Works Agency](http://www2.oaklandnet.com/government/o/PWA/o/FE/s/ID/OAK024735#Drain).
Delivered
Alameda County Census 2020 Landing Page
This landing page was a portal for the 2020 Census administered by Alameda County. It will be accessible at locations where a computer or tablet is provided to the public and is intended to introduce people to the Census and offer information in their native language about why the Census is important to complete, as well as resources and guides on how to complete the Census. It is intended to be welcoming to people for whom English is not their first language.
Delivered
Alameda County Census 2020 Events
Census partners can submit events (workshops, tabling, drop-in centers, etc) and resources around the 2020 census. Alameda County residents can learn more about the first all digital census through these events, even finding locations where they can get assistance to complete the census. Residents can search for events based on date, location, and language.
Delivered
CannaEquity.org
In 2017, City of Oakland expanded their medical cannabis licensing to include regulation for cultivation and manufacturing. As part of this activity, the City also codified an Equity Licensing Program to address barriers to participation in the industry for members of disenfranchised communities in Oakland. This program includes a provision for “equity business incubators” to support new businesses in the industry. Equity businesses in the pipeline will be important to regular applicants, because regular licenses will only be issued on a one-to-one basis with equity licenses during the initial phase of the program. The incubator opportunity is intended to help new enterprises overcome the barrier of securing commercial space by incentivizing more established businesses to agree to share their existing space for a minimum of three years. By partnering with an equity business, a regular applicant will be moved to the top of the list for the next available non-equity cannabis business license.
To support the Equity Licensing Program, OpenOakland provided support to other volunteer technologists and cannabis entrepreneurs working with the City of Oakland’s City Administrator’s Office and the Department of Race and Equity to develop [CannaEquity.org](http://cannaequity.org/), an online “matchmaking” application that would assist interested equity and regular applicants to locate each other efficiently. Applicants would create online accounts to pre-screen for compatibility and control the pace of information sharing and relationship building needed for the formation of space-sharing relationships. The app will be maintained until the end of phase one of licensing. This date will be determined by the collection of cannabis tax revenue sufficient to launch the next phase of equity applicant support services (assumed to be within one year).
Project lead
Formerly Angela Gennino and Richard Ng
Delivered
CityCamp Oakland
The fifth annual CityCamp successfully took place on Saturday, March 25, 2017 at Oakland City Hall. CityCamp is an unstructured conference where municipal employees, civic leaders, technology folks, software developers, journalists, and engaged residents can meet and discuss the intersections of technology and local government—how innovative technology and data uses can improve civic engagement, increase efficiency and transparency, connect residents, and incubate the technology community in our city. Unconferences are not structured up-front; the agenda is completed on the day based on topics the attendees themselves suggest. This gives attendees control over the topics and discussion happening at the event, so residents can drive attention towards issues they think are most important.
Connect on Slack
#event-citycampoakland
Delivered
Discount Mobility Share
Discount Mobility helped low income residents get access to scooter share, bike share and car share programs. While every company has discount programs for low income residents, the application process is fragmented and these benefits aren’t widely known. We unified the application for these programs and engaged in outreach so people were aware of this benefit.
Delivered
Early Oakland
Built in partnership with the Oak Education Cabinet in 2011, Early Oakland provided information on early learning programs that were state subsidized and federally supported Head Start programs in Oakland, including Bananas Child Care Resource and Referral, Oakland Head Start and the Unity Council Preschool, as well as Oakland Unified School District Early Childhood Education Department. It included part-day and full-day programs for three- and four-year-olds, and a few programs also served younger children.
Delivered
Funding Public Safety
Oakland’s Public Safety and Services Oversight Commission (SSOC) is tasked with monitoring how the City spends Measure Z funds, aimed at reducing violence by funding community policing, and violence interruption and prevention programs. In the summer of 2021, members of the SSOC approached OpenOakland for support making sense of the data they were receiving from the City in anticipation of their funding recommendations to City Council at the end of the year. OpenOakland helped them identify key questions and goals, understand the scope of available data and its limitations, and prepared them to make their recommendations with confidence. The team then prepared for a potential phase 2 of the project, involving a public website housing the information they learned and exploring Oakland’s public safety issues in more depth. A key component of this was identifying potential community stakeholders and impacted populations for further engagement in shared decision-making and project design should the project continue.
Delivered
La Escuelita
OUSD doesn’t provide resources for school websites, but many parents (and parents of prospective students) expect them to. La Escuelita, a K-8 elementary school in the Lake Merritt area, wants help developing a simple website that goes live in Fall 2020 term; houses essential info like announcements, schedule changes (currently rely on paper fliers students bring home) and contact info; offers easy-to-use technology and a layout that non-technical staff can easily update and maintain.
Delivered
Oakland Art Murmur
OpenOakland partnered with Oakland Art Murmur to build tools that art enthusiasts can use to promote Oakland art. At the heart of this partnership was Art Murmur’s interactive Art Map. The map features a series of curated walking tours. Clicking along the tour route reveals photographs of public art in Oakland with accompanying information about the artwork. The team built a submission form that allows anyone to submit new art to the map by leveraging [Oakland Wiki](https://localwiki.org/oakland/Murals).
Delivered
Oakland Beats
This tool helps visitors determine which Community Police Beat they live in. In Oakland, [Neighborhood Councils](https://www.oaklandca.gov/topics/neighborhood-councils) (formerly known as Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council or NCPC), operate for each of the 53 Community Police Beats. The Neighborhood Council system provides a way for residents to gather and discuss local crime problems with a city and OPD representative on a monthly basis.
View code
Connect on Slack
#project-oak-crime
Delivered
Open Government Pledge
During Oakland‘s 2012 elections, OpenOakland asked electoral candidates to take the [Open Government Pledge](http://oaklandcandidates.org/OpenGovPledge2012.pdf) to support three core principles of Open Government: transparency, participation, and collaboration. By the end of the elections, four of the six winners had signed onto the pledge.
Delivered
Open Oasis
Phase III (Delivery pending, ~End of Mar 2019): This is mainly focused on developing a survey design, and related questionnaire, to measure OTX impact across their tech literacy programs servicing individuals in public housing. The data team is going to fine-tune our deliveries in Phase II to be “publication-ready”. Meanwhile, our volunteers leading the survey design work are partnered with CUT group to assist with the survey design, implementation approach, and language of questions.
Delivered
RecordTrac
RecordTrac was a simple way for individuals to submit public record requests to a governmental agency online. The application, built in 2013, also allowed government employees to manage, respond to, and fulfill incoming requests. By displaying all submitted records requests, members of the public can find what they need without having to create a new public record request.
Delivered
Soft Story
Soft Story is a simple interactive map of potential soft-story buildings in Oakland. Soft-story buildings are multi-unit, wood-frame, residential buildings with a first story that lacks adequate strength or stiffness to prevent leaning or collapse in an earthquake. These buildings pose a safety risk to tenants and occupants, a financial risk to owners, and risk the recovery of the city and region. This data shows the results of a screening program for potential soft-story buildings in Oakland. In 2008 Oakland surveyed its multi-family buildings with five or more units, and in 2009 passed an ordinance that required the owners of these buildings to complete a simple evaluation of the ground floor. This data shows the results of these screenings as of early 2013.
Connect on Slack
#project-soft-story
Delivered
Track G – Oakland’s Measure G
Measure G is a city ballot measure that was passed by the citizens of Oakland in 2008 to improve the quality of education provided by Oakland public schools. Money is collected from Measure G via a special parcel tax, which amounts to about $20 million a year in additional funds for the Oakland Unified School District’s budget. [Track G – Oakland’s Measure G](https://trackg.org/) publishes data on how funds collected from the Measure G parcel tax are spent. Track G allows spending to be seen by location, by program, and by school.
Project lead
Formerly John Baldo, Erin Hancock
Connect on Slack
#project-track-g
Delivered
Water Quality
Approximately one million California residents currently only have access to drinking water that does not meet state and federal standards. The California Drinking Water project provides user-friendly online queries, charts, and maps to show which water systems have current and persistent drinking water contamination violations. Partnering with the State Water Board and the Community Water Center non-profit organization, Open Oakland volunteers developed a tool features using the State’s bi-monthly Human Right to Water water quality reporting data on cities, communities, schools, and daycares. The online features allow government officials, advocates, researchers, and residents to more easily understand which water systems have contamination problems and identify solutions that support clean water for all Californians. Used daily by local grassroots organizations, the site won awards at two consecutive Water Data Challenges.
Project lead
Open, formerly Aaron Hans
Connect on Slack
#project-ca-water-challenge
Status definitions
Active
These projects are actively supported by a core team of OpenOakland volunteers. To contribute or provide feedback, see Get involved.
Incubating
Incubating projects are in the exploratory or start-up phase before becoming an official OpenOakland project. To be listed as an incubating project, ideas must have a draft project exploration worksheet completed, an acting lead shepherding the idea, and be actively recruiting collaborators. Placement on the website is at the discretion of the Steering Committee.
Brigade ops
These projects support OpenOakland’s operations. Like Active and Incubating projects, they are open to volunteer contributions.
Idle
Sometimes projects go quiet when the core team gets too busy or disbands. If you’d like to resume or adapt one of these, submit a project exploration worksheet at an upcoming Hack Night or in Slack’s #oo-steering-committee channel.
Delivered
Delivered projects have either reached their intended conclusion or been handed off to a partner for long-term management. Because most of OpenOakland’s work is open source, these projects can often be reproduced or adapted by anyone with an interest in doing so.
Decommissioned
These are projects the Steering Committee has formally reviewed and deemed no longer a good fit for OpenOakland. These projects may not be reinstated without submitting a new project exploration worksheet that substantively addresses the original reasons for discontinuation. Project briefs that are declined by the Steering Committee twice may not be resubmitted without substantive changes.
Get involved
There are several ways to contribute to an existing project:
- Join us for our Tuesday meetups to connect with the project team.
- Join our Slack workspace and introduce yourself in the project’s channel listed in the description (see our OpenOakland Slack Guide for help).
- Email steering@openoakland.org with any questions or feedback.
How to start a new project
If you have a new idea for an OpenOakland project:
-
Fill out the project exploration worksheet. We encourage you to join our Slack workspace and share your draft with our membership, so we can collaborate together as you develop your idea.
-
Submit your draft brief to the #oo-steering-committee channel on Slack for formal consideration. Provided your brief is submitted at least two weeks in advance, it will be reviewed at the next Steering Committee meeting (a group of elected leadership and existing project reps), and you’ll get some initial feedback and be asked to make adjustments accordingly.
-
Make any requested adjustments based on the Steering Committee’s feedback and resubmit the final brief.
Once your final brief is submitted, the Steering Committee will hold a formal vote to approve or decline the project.
What makes a good project?
We generally consider the following types of projects:
- Civic tech projects: providing tools or services to Oaklanders or public agencies to increase access to and understanding of government.
- Events: major events that require a team to execute.
- OpenOakland sustainability projects: efforts to improve and sustain OpenOakland as an organization.
Projects must demonstrate alignment to OpenOakland’s mission and values. Some ways a project might do so include:
- Partnering with organizations to serve as domain experts in the needs of the community it serves
- Forming a project team which has lived experience with the issue the project is focused on
- Conducting user research to understand the needs of the community the project serves
Provide feedback
In the spirit of continuous improvement and self-reflection, we welcome any and all feedback on OpenOakland projects past and present, as well as the overall project management process. Ways you can share your input include:
- Open an issue in the project’s GitHub repository (listed in the project description).
- Join the project’s channel in our Slack workspace and introduce yourself (see our OpenOakland Slack Guide for help).
- Join our next Hack Night and meet the team.
- Email our Steering Committee with your input.