Description of the group

Our goal is to work on projects that will help immigrants, refugees, and people who are being deported or are at risk of deportation. Primarily, we want to be a resource for existing organizations that are working on these issues.

If you have an idea for a project and want to chat about it with the group, follow the instructions below under projects and then come by ChiHackNight to tell us about it!

UPDATE: We've moved to being at ChiHackNight every other week, choosing to work from some other locations on off weeks (TBD exactly where). Check our (hopefully) up to date calendar for where we will be!

Getting Started

We hang out in the #immigrationtaskforce channel of the chihacknight slack. You can join the slack by visiting http://slackme.chihacknight.org/

Projects

Projects fall into three categories, "Active", "Proposed", and "On Hold".

• Active projects are regularly being worked. They have at least one person who's pushing the project forward and available to answer questions about how to get involved.
• Proposed projects are ideas someone had that are not yet being actively worked on because no one has yet volunteered to be responsible for it.
• On Hold projects were started but are not currently being worked on for one issue or another.

Below are links to lists of active, proposed, and on-hold projects. The list of all open projects is here. If none of the active projects need help or seem exciting to you, you can take ownership of a proposed project or create a new one!

Owning a project

Owning a project means being responsible for helping a project make forward progress, even if it's very slowly! Generally, the group's expectations of what it means to own a project are the following:

1. Keep track of what needs to happen next on the project and, as time permits, try to make those things happen.
2. Be available via some communication medium to respond to people interested in the project, even if just with "I'm swamped right now in my non-volunteer life, I'll get you an answer when my life is less crazy, ideally within the next few weeks."
3. Make it to ChiHackNight on a semi-regular basis. As an arbitrary baseline, say once a month.
4. Being respectful of the rest of the group's time and letting them know if you can no longer own the project

If you're interested in owning a project, contact Yonatan (yonatan (at) yonatankogan.com or @yjkogan on slack).

Creating a project

If you want to create a new project, do the following:

1. Create a GitHub account if you don't already have one: https://github.com/join
2. Open a new GitHub Issue in this repository: https://github.com/chi-immigration-task-force/getting-started/issues/new
3. Set the title of your issue to the name of your project, and fill out the description template in the body. We will add the appropriate labels to it.

Active Projects

Definitely up to date list is here

• Building an app for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, focused first on finding resources and an "Emergency" button. (Link)
• Digital Security 101 for immigration lawyers and groups. (Link)

Proposed Projects (need an owner)

Definitely up to date list is here

• Find datasets that would allow us to measure the likelihood of deportation based on whether or not you have an attorney. This was powerful data that convinced new york to provide free legal services for immigrants.(Link)
• Create a place / site that people can go to find ways to help the immigrant community. AKA centralize and perpetuate some of the ways to get involved that are passed among people in this group but not recorded anywhere. (Link)

Projects on hold

Definitely up to date list is here

• Some way for people to quickly understand what public benefits they're eligible for given their immigration status, focusing on what we can do to help support another ChiHackNight project/company, mRelief. (Link)