Code for DC is a non-partisan, non-political group of volunteer civic hackers working together to solve local issues and help people engage with the city.

I used to participate in their project nights both to hack away some code and to also help the organizer, either by manning the door, or by carrying the pizza.

They have lots of projects going on in a variety of languages.

District Housing is a project aimed to ease the filling of affordable housing forms. Each building has a different form, so this project has a master form with all the data usually required in the specific form. So a social worker can use this project to fill in a master form and with that, print out any registered specific form with the data filled in.

The project is written in Ruby on Rails, it integrates with google docs to retrieve the specific forms.

I contributed by adding an integration with OpenStreetMap to allow visualization of each buiding in a map. And also the ability to set a default text for a field, for instance, to allow "Not Available" to be displayed if there was no middle name for an applicant.

Techcorridor.io is the site for a group of developers from Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, IA, (I believe) in the same vein of Code for DC. Once we had someone in a project night in Code for DC helping them make their site and I joined.

I created their "Developers" page, which retrieved its data using Meetup's API. Unfortunately something has broken and the request is failing authentication.