How a Miami-area group is using tech to fight inequality and social justice issues

The global pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, the heated political contests nationally and locally — if the events of 2020 have taught us anything, it’s that there is often a disconnect between government and the people.

A young Miami nonprofit, Code for South Florida, is bringing techies together from Miami-Dade and Broward to create solutions to bridge that gap with the help of technology, and often in partnership with government departments, nonprofit organizations and colleges.

South Florida civic-tech organization

As South Florida’s only civic-tech organization, Code for South Florida aims to facilitate community feedback between governments and citizens, create and open up data sets for public insights, and support the governments and organizations in revamping social services for the 21st century, said Gregory Johnson, executive director of the organization.

To do all that, it leverages open source data, builds prototypes and supports data collaborations that push to make South Florida better.

Governments working for the people

“The government should work for the people in the digital age. Code for South Florida is needed to demonstrate what that looks like, help others do it for themselves, and build a movement around that principle,” said Johnson, who is also a civic innovation fellow for Microsoft.

For several years, two volunteer groups, Code for Miami and Code for Fort Lauderdale, had been gathering for open-hack nights and hackathons, undertaking tech projects benefiting the communities. About a year ago, they joined under the Code for South Florida umbrella, formalizing a structure for the combined social impact organization.

Today Code for South Florida has seven paid part-time staff, and about 49 active volunteers. By design, the staff of Code for South Florida is diverse in order to avoid the “tech bro culture” that can pervade tech organizations, Johnson said.

Here are two of the larger projects the group is undertaking:

▪ People Budget: Now in development, this is envisioned as a participatory budgeting tool making it easy for people to learn about how their local government budgets are being spent as well as giving them a say as to where they want the money to go. At the same time, an analytics dashboard will help elected officials understand those views, said Livio Zanardo, Miami program manager for Code for South Florida and a freelance technologist.

The organization is working with Miami Dade College computer science professor, David Freer, and a group of five MDC students to create the prototype. Projects like People Budget give students an opportunity to work with real projects, Freer said. “There’s a goal, and you’re really committed to getting it done and the students feel part of something special.”

The project has funding from New America and Stanford, and membership models are being considered to sustain and scale it because the tool would also be useful to journalists and nonprofits, for instance. Zanardo said they hope to pilot test People Budget in Miami next year.

▪ Local Air: This project involves placing low-cost sensors in public spaces — there are already several around Metrorail stations — to monitor air quality, as well as temperature and humidity, and look for a correlation between air pollution and COVID-19, which has been found by researchers, and how that is impacting black and brown communities.

“With the data what we’re really looking to do is work with subject matter experts and are reaching out to the city’s climate and resilience teams to get their look at it and we are also collaborating with the EPA and Census,” Johnson said.

In all its projects, Code for South Florida answers the call of the community.

Eviction and social justice projects

In response to COVID-19, Code for South Florida rolled out an Eviction Protection project that allows people to see a path of what happens county by county if you can’t pay rent. The organization worked closely with Community Justice Project, another nonprofit, to create the tool.

Also, because during the pandemic being able to efficiently access cash digitally is more important than ever, Code for South Florida forged a partnership to bring a Code for America project called Get Your Refund, an earned income tax assistance initiative providing virtual tax assistance, to Florida, said Shakeia Kegler, Broward program manager for Code for South Florida and founder of Govlia, a startup.

Monitoring police complaints

Then there’s Badge Watch, which monitors police complaints in Miami. The information is all publicly available but not easily accessible to the common person. As a side project, WLRN reporter Danny Rivero wanted to make his spreadsheet data accessible and put out a tweet in August asking for techie help.

Within a week, Johnson, executive director of Code for South Florida, launched a first version, badgewatch.org, which tracked use-of-force incidents and citizen complaints against City of Miami police officers since 2018. Plans are underway to deepen the database and update the app.

“Our work is building solutions and building tools. But for these tools to have the impact that they are meant to have, there is a lot of people work involved, a lot of relationships to build. At the end of the day it is the public interest we are trying to serve, and that’s every single person in Miami,” Zanardo said.

Adds Johnson, “We hope that our work will serve as a beacon for other technologists, leaders, and public servants to follow suit and start a critical mass of interest focused on public interest technology and socially-conscious services.”

How to get involved

Find out more about the organization at www.codeforsouth.org

Nancy Dahlberg is a freelance business writer. Reach her at ndahlbergbiz@gmail.com and follow her on Twitter @ndahlberg