About Us

Plumed Serpent (Quetzalcóatl)

Robert Graham

https://www.robertgrahamartist.com/plumed-serpent/

What is Open Source San José?

We are a group of volunteer developers, designers, researchers, community organizers, and more who collaborate on technical projects that better our community, including websites, civic apps, data visualizations, and media projects.

We create a space for San José’s civic tech community to meet, experiment and collaborate on all kinds of projects through our twice- monthly Civic Hack Nights.

We typically meet twice a month on Thursdays 6:30-9:00pm in downtown San José. Find our next events by joining our Eventbrite group.

Technical skills are not required to contribute. Project managers, subject matter experts, communications specialists, writers, researchers, community organizers, creatives, designers, developers, data scientists are all welcome!

Core Values

  • We are civic innovators for good – we experiment, we build, we push boundaries to discover better ways to do things.
  • We believe community members’ ideas, skills and experiences can benefit our city when applied to civic challenges.
  • We believe technology can enable change, but it is far less important than the change it can support when used effectively.
  • We work in the open, prioritizing open source technology that others can use freely to improve their communities.
  • We are nonpartisan and do not endorse candidates for elected office.
  • We are anti-racist. We stand against systemic oppression of minorities – especially BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) –, racism, bigotry, prejudice, and white supremacy.

Our Approach

  • We openly collaborate with others seeking to improve our community for all.
  • We design with those we seek to serve rather than designing for them.
  • We value human-centered design and always consider technology to be secondary to the real needs of people using the technology.
  • We work using agile methods- we experiment, build fast, learn and adapt rather than assume we know the perfect solution to begin with.

On Government

  • We believe government is a powerful engine of change.
  • We value and respect public service while simultaneously working to improve and update our city government.
  • We believe an open government is more responsive, less corrupt and more accessible to the community.
  • We believe our city will be stronger with more opportunities for San José residents to participate in our civic society when the government better engages all communities.

On Community

  • We believe that powerful change comes from the community.
  • We value nonprofits and community-based organizations that serve to improve the quality of life for residents in San José and the wider South Bay.
  • We believe inclusive and connected communities make our city stronger by providing more opportunities for civic engagement.
  • We believe we build better solutions by listening to our community.
Content Magazine article

Podcast 1

Citizen and Immigration Information Tool

Sep 30, 2021

Have more questions about our history and how we operate? See our FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page.

Let's collaborate!

Pitch a design, data or coding project for our volunteers to work on. You can share your idea or email us.

Check out our FAQ for more details on how the proposal process works.

Our Executive Team

Executive Directors

Joey Richardson

Co-Director

Nick Katsantones

Co-Director

Board Members Team

Janet Sosa

Board Member Treasurer

Valdo Drozdek

Board Member Secretary

Project Leaders

Former Leadership

Ellina Yin

Co-Director

Kalen Gallagher

Co-founder and Co-Captain 2014 - 2017

Michelle Thong

Co-founder and Co-Captain 2014 - 2019

Vivek Bansal

Co-Captain 2014 - 2019 Vivek was a Co-Captain and Project Manager with Code for San José. His overall goal was inspiring people to contribute to local government and non-profits.

He worked on projects like Open Disclosure and starting up the South Bay OpenStreetMap team. One of his most stressful and time consuming projects was leading the San Jose sidewalk import with Minh.

Yan Yin Choy

I was involved with Open Source San José from Dec 2016-2020, as a project leader, engineer, researcher, and as a Captain/Executive Director. I worked closely with OSSJ leadership team to coordinate our biweekly civic hack nights, cultivate program partnerships, coach product teams and manage our budget. I loved collaborating with kind people who were passionate about contributing to meaningful projects to help San José and the Bay Area, especially on Renter's Rights Guide, Heart of the Valley, state benefit application audits in collaboration with Code for America, and design audits of DMV's website with the State of California.

In 2017, I led a team to launch Renter's Rights Guide, a website to inform San José renters about their rights and resources. I led a team to conduct user research, learning that Santa Clara County renters faced difficulties understanding policy jargon and navigating challenging website user interfaces to understand renter's rights, policies, eviction process, and finding affordable housing. I presented our findings to government stakeholders, to advocate for plain language and simpler information architecture for easier navigation. From 2017-2019 we maintained the website, keeping it up to date with any policy changes from the City of San José. We archived the website in Jan 2020 because the city improved the user experience of their housing department's website, integrating some of the insights from our user research. From 2019-2021, we collaborated with Tenant Together's SMS Helpline for Tenants Project, providing our support with user research, marketing and community engagement on tools that help tenants facing eviction.

In 2018, I launched Heart of the Valley, a map that OSSJ continues to maintain. The map takes public data from the City of San José on public art and murals, as well as information made available publicly, to map the incredible murals and public art in South Bay (also known as "Valley of Heart's Delight", South Bay Area). This open source project aims to raise awareness of the beautiful public art that makes our communities vibrant, and discover local artists and creative leaders from the South Bay.

I started discussing this idea with Jennifer Ahn and Juan Carlos Araujo of Empire Seven Studios, a local art studio located in Japantown, San José, California. We brainstormed ideas for the map, and Juan Carlos came up with the name Heart of the Valley. The map project began! I worked with a team of OSSJ volunteers to add more data to the map, and handed it over in 2020 to the current team to continue to develop the map. I'm excited to see the map evolve.