Who built OpenAccessPHL’s new website

OpenAccessPHL has a new home (and logo) on the web. Like the group itself, the site is a grassroots effort, built by community members.

Run by Jeff Friedman, Paul Wright, Yuriy Porytko and Sarah Johnson, the nearly four-year-old public-private group holds monthly meetings where Philadelphians give lightning presentations about the work they’re doing. Think of it as a monthly afternoon Ignite Philly with a more focused mission: promoting open data, digital inclusion, community participation and civic tech.

The event has grown in the past year, drawing a crowd that represents a wide cross-section of the Philadelphia tech community. It’s not just startups and civic hackers, but also staffers from places like Philabundance, the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission and the City of Philadelphia.

The group’s old website hadn’t been updated much since its launch in 2011. When organizer Johnson heard that at an OpenAccessPHL meeting, she offered to help. Johnson, a Girl Develop It teacher, has been building the website at the weekly Code for Philly meetups along with Nnena Odim and Karin Brown, whom she teamed up with at during a Girl Develop It/Code for Philly joint meetup. See the Code for Philly project site here.

The website will act as a bulletin board for announcements — it’ll replace the email listserv model that the group has outgrown, as well as a place for news and stories about OpenAccessPHL presenters. It’ll hopefully carry momentum between the meetups, Wright said.

AWeber, the Chalfont-based email marketing company, also donated their services to OpenAccessPHL, said Porytko.