With ‘ProjectPHL,’ students to build civic software project for free

The young technologists behind the PennApps Fellows summer program are donating their skills to Philadelphia. As part of ProjectPHL, the college and high school students are looking for a civic-focused, open source software project they can build in a month.

Think of the project as a mashup of the civic hacking spirit of the weekly Code for Philly meetups and the pro bono tech work of Azavea‘s Summer of Maps Fellowship.

Anyone with an idea for a project can apply, but it must be a not-for-profit project. The final decision will be crowdsourced.

Backed by a grant from the city’s StartupPHL initiative, PennApps Fellows is a 10-week program that brings college and high school students to Philadelphia to intern at local startups like Monetate, 50onRed and Neat Company.

The winning project will be showcased at the Aug. 1 OpenAccessPHL.