Innovate for Vegas Foundation

Name Change in Progress!

In order that we might be more inclusive (a part of the overall Forkening plan from July 2022), we are renaming our foundation from Code for Vegas Foundation to Innovate for Vegas Foundation.

As with most things, the transitional period will be slightly inconvenient, but ultimately worthwhile.

Our email addresses and basic web content will continue to work at codeforvegas.org and our new email addresses at innovateforvegas.org also work. Our new web platforms for the main innovateforvegas.org site and the related portals at CodeFor.vegas and CreateFor.vegas

Watch this space for updates (or email info+namechange@innovateforvegas.org.

Public Charity Determination and Donations!

As of 12 October 2022, Code for Vegas Foundation has received our determination letter from the IRS; we are a 501(c)(3) public charity retroactive to 16 June 2022 when we formed this Nonprofit Corporation in the State of Nevada. Our name change will flow to the IRS shortly, our EIN and determination status will not be effected. You can find our Foundation in the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search, where a copy of our Determination Letter may be found in the Final Letter section.

Would you like to support our local innovators and local innovation, which is entirely civic volunteerism in action? Any donations you would care to make via the Stripe.com link below, are tax deductible per our 501(c)(3) public charity determination and tax exempt status.

Donate Direct

Got Logos?

Our first ask of our Creator Community (and anyone else) is for some New Logos!. Our name change will leave our obsolete Code for Vegas Foundation logo in the past, with a bright and interesting future ahead. What better time to conjure new images and branding to align with our new outlook and new name?

At the same time, The Forkening does present the two entrances, which will ideally have associated with them ideas and implementations that resonate with those drawn to either, or both. Since the use of the word Code in our soon-to-be-former Foundation name was off-putting for some, we are changing that completely with our new name (stay tuned, though we have used the new language already here and there), but we will retain these two resonant entrances to our volunteer kitchen, enter whichever you like and take part in what we're cooking up!

CreateFor and CodeFor, two sides of the same coin. Or poker chip. Let's Make our Smart City Smarter!

Thanks a Million!

Thanks to Joshua Leavitt and the Tech Alley Crew for their ongoing support and, of course, the Launch Party they bestowed upon us for the 17 September Tech Alley event in Downtown Las Vegas! Thank you as well to our supporters, our enablers, and most of all our volunteers who are not only developing job skills and doing cool things, but they are Making our Smart City Smarter!

Give a Listen!

Thanks Melissa Rittenhouse and her Entrepreneur Escape Pod podcast for having us on to talk about how we have rebooted this organization and what we hope to accomplish in coming weeks, months, and years, including discussion of our current Virtual Vegas and future Education capstone projects. Give the show a listen and subscribe to hear more interesting podcast episodes about Entrepreneurs in and around Las Vegas!

Join in!

Civic Volunteerism is a highly-visible way to elevate our communities, but we also enable volunteers to gain valuable job skills and new items on their CVs that are valuable during a job search or pursuit of higher education. Open source development is a learning opportunity, a teaching opportunity, and a winning opportunity, for those involved and for those who reap the benefits of these endeavors. When you meet the people who benefit from your work, in your neighborhood, at your school or workplace, or maybe just out and about, you learn directly what it means to make things for others. This is true in the workaday world, to be sure, but it is not every day that you interact with the people you have helped with your language translations, visualizations, audio transformations, human interfaces, and applications. Here, you can!

People in our city and surrounding communities will often encounter a focus on 21+ events and gatherings. We encourage kids of all ages (with parental permission, if you please) to participate in our Monthly Hackathon Meetups, Rally at Tech Alley, all projects, online activities, and everything else we do. We are proactively committed to inclusivity and to maintaining open doors for those of any age, an important part of our ethos.

We thank you in advance for contributing your time and innovative creativity, no matter your age, interests, or skillset, because You Are Welcome.

Re-Naming and The Forkening!

In coming days and weeks (as of 12 October 2022) we will be re-naming our Foundation to better align with our goals and values. A very very minor change, many will barely notice, but it is important that we represent our brand and vice versa. Stay tuned for that in October and November, 2022!

As well, in order that we might resonate with all of our innovators near and far, we are still forking our public presence into CreateFor.vegas and CodeFor.vegas, with websites and logos and resources designed by and for our volunteers to be inclusive! These launches will coincide with our re-name and re-brand efforts for the Foundation!

This website you are looking at now remains our main site for this Foundation, a Nevada Nonprofit, and now a 501(c)(3) public charity retroactive to 16 June 2022, so that we may provide general information about the business of civic volunteerism donations and financial activity (always transparent), and other useful bits.

About Us

The Code for Vegas Foundation was rebooted from the original Code for Vegas in 2022, formed as an independent Nevada Nonprofit Corporation on 16 June 2022, and is a 501(c)(3) public charity determined by the IRS, effective retroactively from the time of our formation. While we had kept the name of our predecessor organization formed in 2014, we endeavor to include all comers wishing to contribute and collaborate on these civic projects and goals, without a specific focus on coding. Thus our pending legal name change to Innovate for Vegas Foundation, to be more inclusive and to look forward, not backward…

Purpose

To enable and encourage civic ideation, innovation, and implementation to make our communities better.

This means focusing the energies of local innovators on our local communities for local innovation that Makes our Smart City Smarter.

Ethos

Our core principles are essential:

• Inclusivity
• Diversity
• Accessibility

These principles apply not only to project participation, but also to all meetups, gatherings, online publications, project deployments, and ongoing development of any type of work product. We invite all those interested in learning, contributing, and collaborating on civic projects designed to improve our communities, to do so with confidence and conviction!

Mission

We will invite members of the population at large to build an organization centered on civic volunteerism, skills development, and job creation, with a focus on Making our Smart City Smarter, improving Education, and driving our 3-word ethos: Inclusivity, Diversity, Accessibility.

Policies

Please find the latest versions of our policies on GitHub, visible using your web browser visiting these links:

• Code of Conduct - Innovate for Vegas Foundation
• Contributing to Projects - Innovate for Vegas Foundation

tl;dr: Be civil at least, enable and encourage, elevate don’t castigate and above all if you are interested (and interesting?) you are invited so come on down and get involved!

Events

Monthly Rally at Tech Alley

This is our monthly gathering and meetup at Tech Alley, welcome to all to visit and learn about the projects of the previous month and those upcoming, along with answering questions and presenting updates to our Big and Bigger Plans.

Here we present a Show & Tell of projects as they become showable, or tellable. Projects may be web or mobile applications, but may also be other creative works designed to tackle a part of one of the various project topics, or one of the capstone projects. There is also a general conversation at each meetup about the various projects, how to participate, and future plans.

• When: Saturday, 19 November 2022, 11am-12:15pm
• Where: Suite 150, inside Art Square in the Downtown Las Vegas Arts District

Transitional Monthly Hackathon Meetup

Our monthly meetups are moving to the weekend after Tech Alley beginning in January! The agenda of the monthly meetup is to pursue the current topic for the month and to allow new participants and curious individuals to see what everybody is working on, maybe to join one or more projects!

• When: Saturday and Sunday, 3 and 4 December 2022, 9am-5pm
• Where: International Innovation Center 1 in Downtown Las Vegas
• Parking: Historic Fifth Street School (Permission Confirmed)

Monthly Rally at Tech Alley

This is our monthly gathering and meetup at Tech Alley, welcome to all to visit and learn about the projects of the previous month and those upcoming, along with answering questions and presenting updates to our Big and Bigger Plans.

Here we present a Show & Tell of projects as they become showable, or tellable. Projects may be web or mobile applications, but may also be other creative works designed to tackle a part of one of the various project topics, or one of the capstone projects. There is also a general conversation at each meetup about the various projects, how to participate, and future plans.

• When: Saturday, 17 December 2022, 11am-12:15pm
• Where: Suite 150, inside Art Square in the Downtown Las Vegas Arts District

Transitional Monthly Hackathon Meetup

Our monthly meetups are moving to the weekend after Tech Alley beginning in January! The agenda of the monthly meetup is to pursue the current topic for the month and to allow new participants and curious individuals to see what everybody is working on, maybe to join one or more projects!

This is our final meetup (a single day, the Sunday after the Tech Alley event for December) of 2022!

• When: Sunday, 18 December 2022, 9am-5pm
• Where: International Innovation Center 1 in Downtown Las Vegas
• Parking: Historic Fifth Street School (Permission Confirmed)

Ongoing Projects

Each month we add another project topic to the mix, as part of our pursuit of the overall Capstone Projects. The monthly topic focus is valuable alone, but as part of the overall project plan each contributes more value to the whole than each individual part.

1. Open Transit was the very first monthly topic and aims to bring project development to Las Vegas locals who may themselves use our public transit system, or know someone who does. This is an ongoing project.
2. Open Data Capture Platform is a modification of the second monthly topic, Earth Month, but increased substantially in scope and relevance. The City of Las Vegas has a substantial collection of Open Data datasets published online, this project will aim to enable crowd-sourced open data collection as well as modern methods of software access to these data for creative uses that we have yet to think of. This is an ongoing project.
3. Smart Social is the way a Smart City communicates with itself. Rather than relying on Nextdoor or Twitter or other social media platforms, the goal is to make use of modern and open standards, tools people have at their disposal without requiring installation of proprietary and questionable software or other products, and ideally built with our ethos in mind (this includes language translations and general accessibility). This is an ongoing project.
4. My Vegas is the Human Interface for our Smart City. Rather than asking people to install mobile applications on devices they may not own, we will attempt to build open standards interfaces to Open Data and other services and information so that more people have more access to more information and interaction. This is an ongoing project.
5. vLocal is an essential component of the online and, eventually, offline real-world experience of what we all know as Locals. People who are a part of the communities that are Las Vegas, whether within the city limits, a little bit farther away in Southern Nevada, or maybe much farther away but visiting now and then. Ideally this project will focus on secure communication credentials as well as secure online identities to facilitate participation in the various other projects (Smart Social, My Vegas, etc) while addressing concerns around identity compromise. This is an ongoing project.
6. Welcome is our project for September-October 2022, to examine and consider our city and communities from the perspective of visitors, whether they are tourists, sports fans, conference attendees, here to see family and friends, or simply passing through, our Smart City can be a great experience for temporary visitors, not only providing a delightful time among we locals, but gifting them when some impressions to bring home with them, and to look forward to next time they come by!

Capstone Projects

Do we need more projects? Of course! Each monthly project focus is not only useful and valuable on its own, but each will come together as part of a larger project with even more general utility than each of the individual projects we tackle each month (and again, these are always ongoing projects). Each monthly project, and each capstone project, will bring job skills development and, ideally, actual jobs to participants, whether that participation is in the form of software code development, graphics, human interface, media development, content creation, artistic works, internationalization and localization efforts, accessibility checks, quality assurance, and even marketing, sales, and project management. Each role is essential and each contributor gets credit for their effort from start to finish.

Virtual Vegas

Virtual Vegas is a Digital Twin implementation, making maximal use of Open Data datasets and all of the specific topics addressed month over month, the goal is to enable the smartest of smart applications and other projects developments to enable discovery, learning, and participation in our Smart City. It would be easy to compare this project to something like Civilization or Sim City, and both of those would be valid comparisons, but this project will aim to be a platform on which someone might build a game similar to these, or develop open news tools, neighborhood communications tools, safety visualizations, and so on. The possibilities are endless!

Education

This is a capstone in the earliest phases of planning and discussion. Early thinking is to enable a more flexible education platform for students of all ages in the Las Vegas area, adapting what was learned during school closures in pandemic lockdown intervals, adaptation to different learning styles, and enabling learning at different rates for different students, especially in cases where there might be a teacher staffing shortage. If Making our Smart City Smarter is the ultimate goal of the Innovate for Vegas Foundation, Education and an educated populace are the bedrock foundation on which this goal is best built.

Partners

Contact Us

If you are unable to attend our in-person or online events, there are other ways we try to interact with our constituents:

• Join Our Discord Server!
• Our GitHub Organization
• Our Page on LinkedIn
• Our real Twitter account
• Our real Instagram account

There is a link on Meetup.com for the former Code for Vegas group formed in 2014. The meetup group account is owned and operated by Code for America and is not affiliated with Innovate for Vegas Foundation.

Email and Github

We will be launching our email list server to share updates about projects and events using the classic, yet still very useful, communication tool known as Electronic Mail. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, please send an email message to addme+mailinglist@innovateforvegas.org.

If you would like to be added as a member of our Github Organization for purposes of collaborating and contributing to projects, please send an email with your preferred Github Handle to addme+github@innovateforvegas.org.