Innovate for Vegas Foundation

Weekly Online Meetings

Weekly Online Initiative Meetup session on Mondays are open to anyone who would like to learn more about our various Initiatives and Component Projects, our Agile for Volunteers Initiative enabling our other Initiatives, and so on.

Weekly Online Office Hours session on Tuesdays are open to anyone who would like to find out what we are up to, talk about civic volunteering, how to collaborate across localities, starting your own cohort, or just about anything else along these lines.

Here are some important details:

• See our Innovation Gatherings Calendar for times and links, check prior for any cancellations or updates.
• We are using Jitsi, an open source, free-to-use, cross-platform video conference platform. There are mobile applications for Jitsi, and it works in your browser.
• Our meetups are generally open to anyone (with nearly zero exceptions), please join in and bring a friend or colleague who might be interested in what we are up to.
• Please observe our Code of Conduct if you choose to participate. Since we know you aren’t going to read it, be pleasant, even if you want to argue.

We are looking forward to engaging with those interested in Civic Volunteerism, Civic Hacking, and Organizing Volunteers for Community Elevation!

Gatherings

Give a Listen!

We have a mostly-weekly audio program, published on Spotify and elsewhere, for discussions about Innovation, Hackathons, Projects, and more. As you read this, the episodes are pre-recorded and then posted, in the future we hope to enable a live streamed audio conversation (and then posting it later for posterity) and interaction with the live stream listeners. What about Video?

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 useful 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 locality will often encounter a focus on 21+ events and gatherings. We encourage people of all ages (with parental permission, if you please) to participate in our Initiatives, 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, effort, and expertise, no matter your age, interests, or skill set, because You Are Welcome.

About Us

Some history, 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 legal name change to Innovate for Vegas Foundation, to be more inclusive of volunteers with a diverse set of skills and interests and to look forward, not backward…

Purpose

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

This means focusing the energies of local and non-local innovators in communities near and far on innovation that Makes a Smart City Smarter while elevating communities regardless of locality.

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!

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 Red Stripe.com button below, could be tax deductible per our 501(c)(3) public charity determination and tax exempt status. This is neither legal nor tax preparation advice.

Donate Direct

Vegas and Beyond

As is the case so often with Open Source Projects, all of our work is open to collaboration with others in the civic volunteer universe.

According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor Authority there are approximately 40 million people visiting our Oasis in the Desert for 2024 (give or take), and we would like very much for those visitors to try civic volunteer projects out for themselves! And, to bring their experiences back home with them, so they will understand the value of time spent by volunteers to make their communities better, where they live each day and when they visit other places.

Governance

As a Nevada Nonprofit Corporation, the Innovate for Vegas Foundation is governed by a Board of Directors, made up of those interested in elevating communities through civic volunteerism, including but not limited to so-called Civic Tech pursuits.

Members of our board are not compensated (nor is anyone in our organization, 100% volunteer), and are not requested nor required to participate in the actual pursuit of community elevating initiatives, though they are certainly welcome to join in day-to-day. Our Board members help us make long term planning decisions, present-day policy decisions, and tell our story when out and about.

Directors need not be residents of the State of Nevada nor located in the Greater Vegas area. In fact, Directors need not be US Citizens nor US Residents. Directors serve a term of one year with an automatic option to renew for the following year, up to 20 consecutive years. If you see an empty seat or would like to see us add one, please reach out to our organization secretary via email (secretary at innovateforvegas.org).

Ongoing Initiatives

All Innovate for Vegas Foundation Initiatives are self-sponsored, designed and managed by Civic Volunteers within our organization. There are no end dates, which makes each Initiative and its Component Projects an ongoing development effort, which may be joined sooner or later. This means there is always something to work on, to improve, to be inspired by, especially for those new to Civic Volunteerism and Community Elevation.

Our overall strategy is to make an attractive appeal to Civic Volunteers interested in contributing their time, effort, and expertise to any of existing or new Initiatives, with the knowledge that their contributions will not be archived nor tossed out. Building components that fit together in a larger plan, one of our Apex Initiatives for example, will help to provide a roadmap to sustained use, in as much as we are able to keep contributed creative work actively integrated into one or more Component Parts of any Initiative.

Adding new Component Projects or whole Initiatives is an activity for a Whole Team, a part of the Agile for Volunteers Initiative driven by our Foundation for our own uses, and for public consumption and experimentation. Our organization is entirely open source, volunteer-driven, and open to collaboration with The World, for the purposes of Community Elevation, wherever and whichever those communities may be.

Apex Initiatives

Each Initiative focus is not only useful and valuable on its own, but each will come together as part of a larger Initiative with even more general utility than each of the individual Initiatives and Component Project which we pursue on an ongoing basis. Each Initiative and its Component Projects, and each Apex Initiative, 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, as a matter of policy.

Virtual Vegas

Virtual Vegas is a Digital Twin implementation, making maximal use of Open Data datasets and all of the specific topics addressed with each Initiative, 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 visual simulation games like Civilization or Sim City, and both of those would be valid comparisons, but this Apex Initiative 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 Apex Initiative is in search of direction, having stuck 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 (and beyond), 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 one goal of the Innovate for Vegas Foundation, Education and an educated populace are the bedrock foundation on which this goal is best built.

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:

• Our Fosstodon Account
• Our Bluesky Account
• Our GitHub Organization
• Our Page on LinkedIn

InnovateForVegas.org

This website is focused on our Nevada Nonprofit Corporation and the business and operation aspects of maintaining it as a 501(c)(3) public charity. If you are curious about Initiatives, Component Projects, Team Members, Participation, or in general the Activities of our Civic Volunteer organization, please visit the other side of this coin, at InnovateForVegas.org.