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Week 1: Now Tracking 1,000+ Civic Tech Projects, Hackathons, and Community Solutions

· 2 min read
CommunityOne Team
CommunityOne Team
Open Navigator Development Team

This week marks a significant milestone for Open Navigator as we've dramatically expanded our data model to cover civic technology projects, hackathons, and community-driven governance frameworks.

🎯 What We Accomplished​

1. Added 8 New Civic Tech Entities​

We've integrated civic technology and open source projects as first-class data entities:

  • CIVIC_TECH_PROJECT - GitHub repositories, civic tech projects
  • PROJECT_CONTRIBUTOR - Maintainers and core contributors
  • PROJECT_ISSUE - "Good first issue" labels for new contributors
  • PROJECT_FUNDING - GitHub Sponsors, OpenCollective, grants
  • HACKATHON - National Day of Civic Hacking, CodeAcross events
  • HACKATHON_PROJECT - Projects built at civic hackathons
  • HACKATHON_PARTICIPANT - Contributors and attendees
  • BRIGADE_CHAPTER - Code for America brigade locations (80+ chapters)

2. Community Solutions Framework​

Added 3 entities to track real-world community engagement:

  • COMMUNITY_SOLUTION - Implementation of engagement spectrum (Inform → Defer to)
  • SOLUTION_STAKEHOLDER - CBOs, government, funders, facilitators
  • SOLUTION_METRIC - Track KPIs, outputs, outcomes, and impact

This framework maps to research from:

  • Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership (Facilitating Power)
  • Harvard Data-Smart City Solutions (use case templates)
  • Brookings Institution (Data Academy model)

3. Church & Congregation Data​

Integrated faith-based organizations into our nonprofit tracking:

  • CONGREGATION entity with 20 fields
  • Data sources: ARDA, HIFLD, National Congregations Study
  • Coverage: Churches, mosques, synagogues, temples

📊 By the Numbers​

  • 40+ entities in our comprehensive ERD
  • 2,827 lines of data model documentation
  • 90K+ jurisdictions tracked
  • 3M+ nonprofits monitored
  • 500K+ meeting pages indexed

🔮 What's Next​

Week of April 13:

  • Migrate all citations to Docusaurus documentation
  • Add comprehensive BibTeX references
  • Expand enterprise tech partnerships section

Week of April 20:

  • Fix homepage routing issues
  • Update navigation structure
  • Deploy civic tech section to documentation

Looking Ahead:

  • Extract GitHub data for civic tech projects
  • Build hackathon event calendar
  • Create community solution templates

🚀 Try It Out​

Our data model is fully documented in the Data Model ERD with interactive Mermaid diagrams showing all entity relationships.

Want to contribute? Check out our GitHub repository or join a local Code for America brigade to see the data model in action!

Next Post: Citations Migration and Documentation Improvements (Week of April 13)