CfA Sponsored Booths at Local/Regional Tech Events

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What is the existing policy for Code for America to buy booths and sponsor local brigades at local/regional tech events? If there’s no existing policy, is this something brigades would be interested in?

For context, Hack for LA recently attended the SoCal Linux Expo (SCaLE). This expo is a large, regional tech event (near LA) promoting open source, open data, and open gov. We ran into delays and issues when procuring an exhibition booth for ourselves, which could have been avoided if we paid for a booth (instead of relying on a free booth).

A lot of times, these events bring in people from out of town and we end up promoting other brigades. For instance, this past weekend we encouraged people to check out their local brigades like Open Austin, Open San Diego, and Code for Sacramento.

I think there’s a potential for Code for America to sponsor its brigades (beyond stickers and free swag) at local/regional tech events. If the brigades are promoting the larger Code for America network, it’d be nice to be able to apply for and to get the support/backing of CfA.

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Yes! I’d love to show up at more events to represent the network if I didn’t have to worry about coming up with all the materials and a workflow for routing interested people into the network

It would be awesome if there were some shared poster/banner designs we could either ship around or print locally. A sort of booth-in-a-box

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Awesome, yes! That’s the idea. Maybe even an option for financial support could be a possibility as well. If our brigade is like others, we aren’t actively fundraising and banking to be able to shell out for booths and expos.

Can we get this proposal in front of decision makers? Not sure how that works…

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I vaguely recall seeing a Google Drive folder with CFA swag design files that brigades could use. @civicwhitaker @carlvlewis Do you guys recall this? For some reason, I feel you two were associated with this.

Something we could all contribute to and pull from would be awesome (on GitHub PERHAPS?!).

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Yes, we had it for NDoCH - lemme grab it

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1Nj5x5yKKjtDCcS5vrmBOLXR5RlutSQ_w

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Thanks Christopher!

I like the idea of a booth-in-a-box thing that gets shipped around.

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I’m giving a civic hacking-related talk at ChefConf the weekend before summit and they’ve offered to donate a 3-foot booth for promoting the brigade network

I know that’s the worst timing possible, but any chance I could beta test this @civicwhitaker ?