Today we’re launching the official Oakland Brigade: OpenOakland.

If you’re new to Code for America then you’ve been missing out. If you know them, you may not yet know about the Brigade teams. This is the start of a new brigade to create and redeploy civic innovations, liberate public data, spur innovation within government and bring the excitement of opensource tech to the east bay community!

What we’re looking for is a core group of software developers, engineers, designers and data hounds who see the power of open tech to solve civic issues in Oaktown. We’ll be setting up some goals for the next 12 months, and we need creative people to help lift up tech in our city and showcase the ways opengov can really transform this town. The expectations on Brigade members aren’t heavy, but we will need consistent efforts and communication- wasting our spare time is wack.

We’ll be supporting civic tech events, hackathons, government forums and more and will be meeting regularly to plan, scheme and develop key tools to bring civic change.

Our first challenge as a Brigade is to stand up CKAN– an opensource OPENDATA platform. We need to show the City of Oakland that this can be built in and for our community. We’ll also be using this platform as the data repo for the next Code for Oakland hackathon!

If you want to be a part of this, or just hit the first meeting to see if it fits your life then join the CfA Brigade here: http://brigade.codeforamerica.org/brigades/54

Email the group: openoakland at googlegroups.com

Hit me @spjika or @openoakland to connect!

This will be fun.

This will be disruptive.

This will bring Oakland closer to truly Open Government, Open Data and innovation by default!

We will have beer at Brigade meetings.