Web-based fellowship project ready to take on Detroit

Early next month, Detroit welcomes three visitors who will spend an entire year developing web-based solutions to confront city issues head on.

Matt Hampel, Alicia Rouault and Prashant Singh were selected to be 2012 Detroit fellows for the national organization Code For America, a nonprofit that matches cities with civic-minded designers, coders, developers, engineers and a variety of cross-discipline problem solvers.

After finishing their initial training in San Francisco, the three fellows will come to Detroit on Feb. 3. They will spend a month talking to city officials and community residents about key issues and attending public events. Then they'll return to San Francisco, where they will spend the bulk of the year coming up with ideas and developing them, before returning to Detroit to test them with users. At the end of their fellowship, they will have built projects that are useful for the city and found residents to take responsibility for the projects' future sustainability.

That's just part of the story. Read it in its entirety here.