Innovate for Vegas Foundation

Weekly Online Meetings

Our Weekly Initiative Meetups session on Mondays are open to anyone who would like to learn more about our various Initiatives and Component Projects, our Agile for Volunteers Initiative enabling our other Initiatives, and so on.

Our Weekly Virtual Office Hours session on Thursdays are open to anyone who would like to find out what we are up to, talk about civic volunteering, how to collaborate across localities, or just about anything else along these lines.

Here are some important details:

• See our Innovation Gatherings Calendar for times and links, check prior for any cancellations or updates.
• We are using Jitsi, an open source, free-to-use, cross-platform video conference platform. There are mobile applications for Jitsi, and it works in your browser.
• Our meetups are generally open to anyone (with nearly zero exceptions), please join in and bring a friend or colleague who might be interested in what we are up to.
• Please observe our Code of Conduct if you choose to participate. Since we know you aren´t going to read it, be pleasant, even if you want to argue.

We are looking forward to engaging with those interested in Civic Volunteerism, Civic Hacking, and Organizing Volunteers for Community Elevation!

Events

Give a Listen!

We have a mostly-weekly audio program, published on Spotify and elsewhere, for discussions about Innovation, Hackathons, Projects, and more. As you read this, the episodes are pre-recorded and then posted, in the future we hope to enable a live streamed audio conversation (and then posting it later for posterity) and interaction with the live stream listeners. What about Video?

Join in!

Civic Volunteerism is a highly-visible way to elevate our communities, but we also enable volunteers to gain valuable job skills and new items on their CVs that are useful during a job search or pursuit of higher education. Open source development is a learning opportunity, a teaching opportunity, and a winning opportunity, for those involved and for those who reap the benefits of these endeavors. When you meet the people who benefit from your work, in your neighborhood, at your school or workplace, or maybe just out and about, you learn directly what it means to make things for others. This is true in the workaday world, to be sure, but it is not every day that you interact with the people you have helped with your language translations, visualizations, audio transformations, human interfaces, and applications. Here, you can!

People in our locality will often encounter a focus on 21+ events and gatherings. We encourage people of all ages (with parental permission, if you please) to participate in our Initiatives, online activities, and everything else we do. We are proactively committed to inclusivity and to maintaining open doors for those of any age, an important part of our ethos.

We thank you in advance for contributing your time, effort, and expertise, no matter your age, interests, or skill set, because You Are Welcome.

About Us

The Code for Vegas Foundation was rebooted from the original Code for Vegas in 2022, formed as an independent Nevada Nonprofit Corporation on 16 June 2022, and is a 501(c)(3) public charity determined by the IRS, effective retroactively from the time of our formation. While we had kept the name of our predecessor organization formed in 2014, we endeavor to include all comers wishing to contribute and collaborate on these civic projects and goals, without a specific focus on coding. Thus our pending legal name change to Innovate for Vegas Foundation, to be more inclusive and to look forward, not backward…

Purpose

To enable and encourage civic ideation, innovation, and implementation to make our communities better.

This means focusing the energies of local innovators on our local communities for local innovation that Makes our Smart City Smarter.

Ethos

Our core principles are essential:

• Inclusivity
• Diversity
• Accessibility

These principles apply not only to project participation, but also to all meetups, gatherings, online publications, project deployments, and ongoing development of any type of work product. We invite all those interested in learning, contributing, and collaborating on civic projects designed to improve our communities, to do so with confidence and conviction!

Mission

We will invite members of the population at large to build an organization centered on civic volunteerism, skills development, and job creation, with a focus on Making our Smart City Smarter, improving Education, and driving our 3-word ethos: Inclusivity, Diversity, Accessibility.

Policies

Please find the latest versions of our policies on GitHub, visible using your web browser visiting these links:

• Code of Conduct - Innovate for Vegas Foundation
• Contributing to Projects - Innovate for Vegas Foundation

tl;dr: Be civil at least, enable and encourage, elevate don’t castigate and above all if you are interested (and interesting?) you are invited so come on down and get involved!

Public Charity Determination and Donations!

As of 12 October 2022, Code for Vegas Foundation has received our determination letter from the IRS; we are a 501(c)(3) public charity retroactive to 16 June 2022 when we formed this Nonprofit Corporation in the State of Nevada. Our name change will flow to the IRS shortly, our EIN and determination status will not be effected. You can find our Foundation in the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search, where a copy of our Determination Letter may be found in the Final Letter section.

Our official re-naming with the IRS will be finalized with one letter and our 990 filing, then an update to our EIN name, update the banks and other services and vendors… There is always some red tape to cut through.

Would you like to support our local innovators and local innovation, which is entirely civic volunteerism in action? Any donations you would care to make via the Stripe.com link below, are tax deductible per our 501(c)(3) public charity determination and tax exempt status.

Donate Direct

We Are Global!

As is the case so often with Open Source Projects, all of our work is open to collaboration with others in the civic volunteer universe.

According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor Authority there are approximately 40 million people visiting our Oasis in the Desert for 2024 (give or take), and we would like very much for those visitors to try civic volunteer projects out for themselves! And, to bring their experiences back home with them, so they will understand the value of time spent by volunteers to make their communities better, where they live each day and when they visit other places.

From July 1, 2023, Mary Fey Long Norris joined our Board of Directors to help us reach out to civic volunteers all over the United States, to collaborate on our projects and to bring theirs to our little test site, so that more people from more places can learn about what we do to elevate our communities and perhaps make things work a little bit better, and maybe make some ideas come to life for people to try…

From July 1, 2024, Shawn L Dean joined our Board of Directors to help us lean in to our other capstone, Education, along with general engagement with students and young people interested in technology and civic volunteerism.

Also as of July 1, 2024, Shawn Looker stepped down from our Board of Directors to pursue other adventures in far-away lands. Shawn was instrumental in co-founding and co-captaining the original Code for Vegas, and helping us get the Code for Vegas Foundation rebooted and later turned into this, the Innovate for Vegas Foundation.

Governance

As a Nevada Nonprofit Corporation, the Innovate for Vegas Foundation has filled the following roles to govern the operation and growth of this organization:

Ongoing Initiatives

Each month we add another project topic to the mix, as part of our pursuit of the overall Capstone Projects. The monthly topic focus is valuable alone, but as part of the overall project plan each contributes more value to the whole than each individual part.

1. Open Transit was the very first monthly topic and aims to bring project development to Las Vegas locals who may themselves use our public transit system, or know someone who does. This is an ongoing project.
2. Open Data Capture Platform is a modification of the second monthly topic, Earth Month, but increased substantially in scope and relevance. The City of Las Vegas has a substantial collection of Open Data datasets published online, this project will aim to enable crowd-sourced open data collection as well as modern methods of software access to these data for creative uses that we have yet to think of. This is an ongoing project.
3. Smart Social is the way a Smart City communicates with itself. Rather than relying on Nextdoor or Twitter or other social media platforms, the goal is to make use of modern and open standards, tools people have at their disposal without requiring installation of proprietary and questionable software or other products, and ideally built with our ethos in mind (this includes language translations and general accessibility). This is an ongoing project.
4. My Muni is the Human Interface for our (and your) Smart City. Rather than asking people to install mobile applications on devices they may not own, we will attempt to build open standards interfaces to Open Data and other services and information so that more people have more access to more information and interaction. This is an ongoing project.
5. vLocal is an essential component of the online and, eventually, offline real-world experience of what we all know as Locals. People who are a part of the communities that are Las Vegas, whether within the city limits, a little bit farther away in Southern Nevada, or maybe much farther away but visiting now and then. Ideally this project will focus on secure communication credentials as well as secure online identities to facilitate participation in the various other projects (Smart Social, My Muni, etc) while addressing concerns around identity compromise. This is an ongoing project.
6. Welcome is like our My Muni project, where we examine and consider our city and communities from the perspective of visitors, whether they are tourists, sports fans, conference attendees, in to see family and friends, or simply passing through, a Smart City can be a great experience for temporary visitors, not only providing a delightful time among locals, but gifting them when some impressions to bring home with them, and to look forward to next time they come by!

Capstone Initiatives

Do we need more projects? Of course! Each monthly project focus is not only useful and valuable on its own, but each will come together as part of a larger project with even more general utility than each of the individual projects we tackle each month (and again, these are always ongoing projects). Each monthly project, and each capstone project, will bring job skills development and, ideally, actual jobs to participants, whether that participation is in the form of software code development, graphics, human interface, media development, content creation, artistic works, internationalization and localization efforts, accessibility checks, quality assurance, and even marketing, sales, and project management. Each role is essential and each contributor gets credit for their effort from start to finish.

Virtual Vegas

Virtual Vegas is a Digital Twin implementation, making maximal use of Open Data datasets and all of the specific topics addressed month over month, the goal is to enable the smartest of smart applications and other projects developments to enable discovery, learning, and participation in our Smart City. It would be easy to compare this project to something like Civilization or Sim City, and both of those would be valid comparisons, but this project will aim to be a platform on which someone might build a game similar to these, or develop open news tools, neighborhood communications tools, safety visualizations, and so on. The possibilities are endless!

Education

This is a capstone in the earliest phases of planning and discussion. Early thinking is to enable a more flexible education platform for students of all ages in the Las Vegas area, adapting what was learned during school closures in pandemic lockdown intervals, adaptation to different learning styles, and enabling learning at different rates for different students, especially in cases where there might be a teacher staffing shortage. If Making our Smart City Smarter is the ultimate goal of the Innovate for Vegas Foundation, Education and an educated populace are the bedrock foundation on which this goal is best built.

Contact Us

If you are unable to attend our in-person or online events, there are other ways we try to interact with our constituents:

• Our Fosstodon Account
• Join Our Discord Server!
• Our GitHub Organization
• Our Page on LinkedIn

There is a link on Meetup.com for the former Code for Vegas group formed in 2014. The meetup group account is owned and operated by Code for America and is not affiliated with Innovate for Vegas Foundation.

Email and Github

We will be launching our email list server to share updates about projects and events using the classic, yet still very useful, communication tool known as Electronic Mail. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, please send an email message to addme+mailinglist@innovateforvegas.org.

If you would like to be added as a member of our Github Organization for purposes of collaborating and contributing to projects, please send an email with your preferred Github Handle to addme+github@innovateforvegas.org.