Connect, Communicate, Collaborate…

If you are interested in participating in any of these endeavors described below, we have a GitHub Discussion group for you…

Please be logged in to your favorite GitHub account and create a new Discussion, see you there!

This side of our Project is moving more slowly since the national Brigade program was sunset in December 2023. However, there are still opportunities to work with former brigades as well as newly-forming cohorts of civic volunteers who would like to, for example, form a stand-alone (autonomous) organization and pursue a 501(c)(3) determination with the IRS.

Elements of this side of the Project will evolve over time, but again more slowly with the change in circumstances experienced simultaneously by all former brigades, as they plot a course into the future based on the wants and needs of their particular cohort.

A tessellation is a mosaic, and in this context an illustration of the various cohorts and projects active around the US and perhaps beyond. Of course to generate that tessellation there needs to be data and then information, and this is the focus of this element of the project. Discovery, visibility, communication, collaboration… these begin with knowing that there are others with similar ideals, similar intent, sometimes similar goals and even similar projects.

Circa October 2022, a discussion was had concerning the transformation of brigades around the United States into autonomous cohorts of civic volunteers, responsible for their own project pursuits and collaboration choices, operating as stand-alone entities (likely 501(c)(3) public charities) or as fiscally-sponsored entities. While in these early days there was no legal talent involved, the goal was to begin conversations and collect and publish resources for those interested in taking the plunge into autonomy.

First public mention of Project-ACT came in a discussion between Mary Norris, Dan Hugo, and Luke Fretwell.

In Early 2023, an announcement was made by Code for America that Brigades would no longer be a part of the heretofore existing Brigade Program, which was to be sunset at the end of 2023. The Brigade Program did come to an end, for the most part, as planned, leaving some civic volunteer organizations searching for what comes next. The Autonomous Cohort Transformation project would thus continue in some way to lend a hand post solis occasum.

At the same time, it became clear that even in the Brigade Times, better tools and methods might be necessary to make organization, project, and contributor discovery and general visibility more likely and easier to deploy and maintain. Taking a look at decades of Semantic Web tools and Methods, including RDF and RDF schema such as DOAP (Description of a Project) and FOAF (Friend of a Friend) to make Project discovery and Organization Network exploration (respectively) automatic without reinventing wheels. One a catalog of organizations and projects, as well as relationships between them, can be discovered, surveyed, and maintained, the next logical step is to create a visualization, perhaps a mosaic, overlaid on a map, displaying projects and organizations as they are at any given time. The parallel and coincident Autonomous Cohort Tessellation project was born and is the primary focus of this organization moving forward!