Collaborate With Us

Identified a problem in the Austin community?

We'd love to work with you and make Austin more liveable for everyone. You can submit a problem statement to our leadership team using the project form linked further on. Before you submit, please make sure your submission is aligned with our guidelines below.

What Constitutes an Open Austin Project?

A project must:

• Solve a real civic need. While there are plenty of good ideas out there, we limit ourselves to civic-tech-related, social impact work. We understand this can be a fuzzy distinction, which is why we always will have you discuss your problem statement/idea with Open Austin leadership before we commit to anything.

• Be open-source for its entire lifetime. If this is code, “open-source” means freely available on GitHub. If the project doesn’t consist of code, this means that the progress and deliverable are openly available in some other accessible way.

• Be non-partisan. Because we are a 501(c)3 organization and we have a diverse group of members, we cannot take on partisan projects. Projects focused on topics like open data and transparency are fair game, but projects to support a partisan political effort are not (i.e transparency tool for campaign finance is good, a website promoting a candidate is a no-go).

How Open Austin Takes on New Projects

1. Submit a project idea with this project idea form.

2. Conduct conversation(s) with the Open Austin leadership team.

3. Craft a project pitch.

4. Set the project up for success — we will work with you on this.

5. Pitch and work on the project at Open Austin’s Community Action Nights (CANs).