Hey Brigade leaders and members, I’m working with the Network team at CfA to identify which software products are most important to your groups and projects. We are looking to approach companies that produce software that’s useful to brigades to solicit donations of those products. In order to help me plan this, I need a bit of info about the current lay of the land.
What software products does your brigade need?
Right now, a couple that are on my radar include Heroku, Github, and Slack of course… but there are many others. Mailchimp? GSuite? What else? Could you tell me a few of the most important pieces of software that you use, currently, or that you would want to use if it were provided to you for free?
Mailgun! It’s great for deploying apps that need to send transactional emails. Their free tier comes with 10K emails/month which is usually plenty but it would be nice to know there’s some support available for email-heavy applications that take off.
Code for Philly is using Laddr for example to send bi-weekly emails to our members that are a hybrid of newsletter and personalized updates. With ~3K members not-yet-unsubscribed we’re getting very close to the 10K limit
Anyone here use RStudio? I was just on a call with a new brigade leader who recommended that requesting the hosting/server space could be a potential time-saver.
Code for San Francisco DS Projects have not used a ton of R, although individuals have expertise. I’m sure R Studio would be welcome, although I don’t have specific ideas of use cases yet.
Honestly, I am of the opinion that we need to move away from Meetup some in terms of a CRM; Meetup just doesn’t work well as a CRM. It’s excellent as an inbound membership acquisition tool, but not very helpful (for us at least) when we want to reach the entire community.
Moreover, at the risk of beating a dead horse, the fact that Code for America and most brigades use Slack instead of an open-source chat alternative is somewhat befuddling. Slack’s great for community. It’s not great for project management (unless you get more than 10 integrations) and it’s an inherently exclusionary piece of software. For example, it’s blocked by City of Savannah’s firewall, meaning we can’t communicate with any gov employees via Slack. Also, given that open source is a fundamental value we all share, why are we using an enterprise product to do it?
We’ve just deployed Mattermost and I can report back on how well it is or isn’t received…
+1 to VPN credits -– Digital Ocean, AWS, or Azure would be a dream!
Chiming in a little late here, but I think it could be great to have access to a Ushahidi instance: https://www.ushahidi.com/. This project was born in a really cool open source spirit, I believe, andtThey used to have a free tier model, but it doesn’t seem like they offer it anymore and have instead become more enterprise focused. I tried to e-mail them recently to see if they’d be open to sponsoring us for a Ushahidi Basic account, but I kind of got the run-around. Maybe it’s better to ask at the Code for America level on behalf of all of us?
Also, it looks like their code is still open, so it would be possible to have a self-hosted version…perhaps this is something the Brigade Network could take on collaboratively?
Hey @linkalis! If you request access to Ushahidi’s Impact Plan, they’ll give you an absolutely free hosted instance within aout 48 hours of review. We got it no trouble.
Hi @carlvlewis! Took me a while to see this, but thanks for the tip. I’m curious: where did you find the information on their Impact Plan? I can’t see to find where to request it on their website…
My brigade needs a lot of different software. For example Heroku, Github, Google Docs with additional storage,Discord, OBS, Chrome,work time, Slack, Jira, IPOTIS, I`d better stop, because i can start list Chrome extentions too
Which Brigade are you with? I’d be curious how some of these are used in the brigade’s project work. I do also want to note this is an old thread so it might be the case that this project is not currently be worked on, but think it’s worth pinging @bentrevino if you have specific needs and want to pilot something.
Some workshops and/or tools to support AI technical development. I am Co-Captain of Code for Fresno. Although being Director of Project Management with Code for Sacramento, we are in need of someone with AI experience for our Trash AI project as well as a back end developer. As far as products, CfA does a great job providing the tools needed thus far. Although AI is the way of the future. If we are to stay as innovative as the world around us, we will have to expand our sights.
Aloha @OtisGotIt and @mzagaja! Happy 2022 and thanks for tagging me in Matt! We’ve been discussing the tech stack on the Program Team a bit more recently and have been thinking through how we can keep up with evolving brigade and project needs more intentionally. As a sneak preview, we might try to establish some kind of shared governance over the brigade program’s “tech stack” and implement a transparent and collaborative budgeting process through Open Collective. @elb has been doing some really great thinking here.
That’s more of a medium to long-term thing, though, so if there’s something that might be helpful over the next 6 months, please let me know!
RStudo. But I’m a nerd.