Open Austin is no longer using GitHub to intake projects. Please submit project ideas using this Google Form. You can track your request's status by joining our Slack.

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Open Austin: Project Ideas

Want to start an Open Austin project?

Share your idea with us!

Looking to jump into an existing project?

• Join an active project
• Revive and direct an abandoned idea
• Browse all the project ideas
• Practice a specific skill, like design, dev, or data wrangling.

About the Open Austin Team

Open Austin uses civic tech to improve quality of life. We want to help citizen, government, and nonprofit stakeholders solve problems.

Open Austin is an open source organization. We make our projects freely and openly available. GitHub is where we collaborate. There are some really handy tools here, including a feature called Issues. This is where we can break projects into manageable problems for collaborators to solve together.

We hope you find what you're looking for, but if you need help, you can email us here!

Thanks for co-creating with us!

How To Propose or Discuss Project Ideas

GitHub Issues work just like any other commenting system on the Internet.

First, you'll need to create an account.

Then you have two options:

Comment on an existing idea (a.k.a. "issue")

Scroll through the issues list first to see if anyone's already thinking the same way! If you see an idea that catches your eye, click on it, read the discussion, and then add your thoughts to the bottom of the discussion thread. If you see the Needs Leadership label, bring it up at a hack night, and if you're up for it you can take the lead on it!

Or, create a new idea.

If you don't see the idea you have in mind, add a new one. You'll need a title and description. Someone from the Open Austin Core Team will respond, likely with some questions or feedback, and assign you to the issue to indicate you are leading the effort.

Here's a quick video intro on using Github Issues for discussion.

Next Steps

• Please make a status update to your issues at least once a month to keep others informed. If we don't hear from you after some time, we might assume you've moved on and will ask others to take the lead.

• If nobody's talking yet, it might be that your idea needs some more fleshing out. We highly recommend thinking through the Civic Tech Canvas as a next step!

• If you're willing to be the champion on this project, you should let one of our project leads know. GitHub is the platform we're using to collect and vet ideas and then convert them into active projects. Once a project becomes active, we'll help you set up a repository on the Open Austin GitHub organization so you can start scoping and collaborating. We'll continue to use the Issues feature on your own project repo to flag obstacles, opportunities, and answer questions about that specific project. We will then add the project repo link to your idea issue and close it, indicating your graduation from idea to an active project.