Justice40 Tool

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Welcome to the Justice40 Open Source Community! This repo contains the code, processes, and documentation for the data and tech powering the Justice40 Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST).

Background

The Justice40 initiative and screening tool were announced in an Executive Order in January 2021, with the goal to launch an MVP of the tool by July 27, 2021. This tool will include interactive maps and an initial draft scorecard which federal agencies can use to prioritize historically overburdened and underserved communities for benefits in their programs.

Please see our Open Source Community Orientation deck for more information on the Justice40 initiative, our team, this project, and ways to participate.

Core team

The core Justice40 team building this tool is a small group of designers, developers, and product managers from the US Digital Service in partnership with the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).

An up-to-date list of core team members can be found in MAINTAINERS.md. The engineering members of the core team who maintain the code in this repo are listed in .github/CODEOWNERS.

Community

The Justice40 team is taking a community-first and open source approach to the product development of this tool. We believe government software should be made in the open and be built and licensed such that anyone can take the code, run it themselves without paying money to third parties or using proprietary software, and use it as they will.

We know that we can learn from a wide variety of communities, including those who will use or will be impacted by the tool, who are experts in data science or technology, or who have experience in climate, economic,or environmental justice work. We are dedicated to creating forums for continuous conversation and feedback to help shape the design and development of the tool.

We also recognize capacity building as a key part of involving a diverse open source community. We are doing our best to use accessible language, provide technical and process documents in multiple languages, and offer support to our community members of a wide variety of background and skillsets, directly or in the form of group chats and training. If you have ideas for how we can improve or add to our capacity building efforts and methods for welcoming folks into our community, please let use know in the Google Group or email us at justice40open@usds.gov.

Community Guidelines

Principles and guidelines for participating in our open source community are available here. Please read them before joining or starting a conversation in this repo or one of the channels listed below.

Community Chats

We host open source community chats every third Monday of the month at 5-6pm ET. You can find information about the agenda and how to participate in our Google Group.

Community members are welcome to share updates or propose topics for discussion in community chats. Please do so in the Google Group.

Google Group

Our Google Group is open to anyone to join and share their knowledge or experiences, as well as to ask questions of the core Justice40 team or the wider community.

The core team uses the group to post updates on the program and tech/data issues, and to share the agenda and call for community participation in the community chat.

Curious about whether to ask a question here as a Github issue or in the Google Group? The general rule of thumb is that issues are for actionable topics related to the tool or data itself (e.g. questions about a specific data set in use, or suggestion for a new tool feature), and the Google Group is for more general topics or questions. If you can't decide, use the google group and we'll discuss there before moving to Github if appropriate!

Contributing

Contributions are always welcome! We encourage contributions in the form of discussion on issues in this repo and pull requests of documentation and code.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for ways to get started.

For Developers and Data Scientists

Datasets

The intermediate steps of the data pipeline and the final output that is consumed by the frontend are all public and can be accessed directly. See DATASETS.md for these direct download links.

Local Quickstart

If you want to run the entire application locally, see QUICKSTART.md.

Advanced Guides

If you have software experience or more specific use cases, start at INSTALLATION.md for more in depth documentation of how to work with this project.

Project Documentation

For more general documentation on the project that is not related to getting set up, including architecture diagrams and engineering decision logs, see docs/.

Glossary

Confused about a term? Heard an acronym and have no idea what it stands for? Check out our glossary!

Feedback

If you have any feedback or questions, please reach out to us at justice40open@usds.gov.