About Us

What is Open Source San José?

We are a group of volunteer developers, designers, researchers, community organizers, and more who collaborate on technical projects that better our community, including websites, civic apps, data visualizations, and media projects.

We create a space for San José’s civic tech community to meet, experiment and collaborate on all kinds of projects through our twice- monthly Civic Hack Nights.

We typically meet twice a month on Thursdays 6:30-9:00pm in downtown San José. Find our next events by joining our Meetup group.

Technical skills are not required to contribute. Project managers, subject matter experts, communications specialists, writers, researchers, community organizers, creatives, designers, developers, data scientists are all welcome!

Core Values

• We are civic innovators for good – we experiment, we build, we push boundaries to discover better ways to do things.
• We believe community members’ ideas, skills and experiences can benefit our city when applied to civic challenges.
• We believe technology can enable change, but it is far less important than the change it can support when used effectively.
• We work in the open, prioritizing open source technology that others can use freely to improve their communities.
• We are nonpartisan and do not endorse candidates for elected office.
• We are anti-racist. We stand against systemic oppression of minorities – especially BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) –, racism, bigotry, prejudice, and white supremacy.

Our Approach

• We openly collaborate with others seeking to improve our community for all.
• We design with those we seek to serve rather than designing for them.
• We value human-centered design and always consider technology to be secondary to the real needs of people using the technology.
• We work using agile methods- we experiment, build fast, learn and adapt rather than assume we know the perfect solution to begin with.

On Government

• We believe government is a powerful engine of change.
• We value and respect public service while simultaneously working to improve and update our city government.
• We believe an open government is more responsive, less corrupt and more accessible to the community.
• We believe our city will be stronger with more opportunities for San José residents to participate in our civic society when the government better engages all communities.

On Community

• We believe that powerful change comes from the community.
• We value nonprofits and community-based organizations that serve to improve the quality of life for residents in San José and the wider South Bay.
• We believe inclusive and connected communities make our city stronger by providing more opportunities for civic engagement.
• We believe we build better solutions by listening to our community.

Have more questions about our history and how we operate? See our FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page.

Let's collaborate!

Pitch a design, data or coding project for our volunteers to work on. You can share your idea or email us.

Check out our FAQ for more details on how the proposal process works.