Boston is home to the first public school in the nation, so it makes sense that they would want Code for America Fellows to build a platform for educational services. Imagine if students could get suggested readings based on current course work or a recent check-in at a museum exhibit. Imagine if students could engage in contests for number of books read or classes attended. Imagine if students could share their experiences, likes and dislikes, and comments about their education just like they do for everything else in their lives. And then imagine what an innovative and responsive educational community could do with all of that information.

Excited by this project? Good. Because we need you to make it happen. It’ll be up to the Code for America Fellows to translate this concept into a reality in 11 short months, which will include everything from researching educational services and working with local officials to designing the user experience and coding the application. As a CfA Fellow, this will be your start-up.

If you’re interested in helping with this project, join our corp of volunteers and stay informed about opportunities to get involved.

Your Challenge

• Build an educational services platform for developers to build applications that promote education.
• Adopt creative uses for the city’s data
• Develop a product from concept to delivery in 9 months that can be used daily by 1.5 million users.
• Survey the existing open source landscape to determine how to re-use, re-mix, and develop the product as efficiently as possible.
• Create and document a product so that is easily reusable by other municipalities.

In tackling this project, you’ll have to answer difficult questions, only some of which we know about now, so we want to open that conversation to everyone. What are the tough issues and questions fellows in Boston will have to grapple with, what are some other challenges for this project, and what else will we need to figure out?