Cypher Philly: Civic Empowerment & Actionable Change Using Data-Driven Storytelling

The Cypher Philly initiative is an open source project that aims to empower citizens, journalists, data scientists, coders, and creatives with the ability to harness open public data for civic good. The team was inspired by the impact of data on investigative journalism and wanted to simplify the process of telling data-driven stories using open public data. They have gained local sponsorship from Linode and Azavea, and are collaborating with various organizations and communities to build and expand their reach. The project provides a collection of digital tools and methods for finding, scraping, importing, and storing data, which are freely available on GitHub. Participants can contribute to the projects by completing tasks and issues assigned to them, and collaborate in real-time meetings to address major civic issues such as gerrymandering and representation.