During 2014, City of Charlotte was host to a Code for America fellowship. Our fellows Danny Whelan and Tiffany Chu were the primary developer and designer of Citygram respectively, and Danny presented repeatedly on the proposed Citygram architecture to both Code for Charlotte and Charlotte Ruby Group meet ups during the construction phase.
You can watch the fellowship presentation on YouTube.
At that time, fellows occasionally pursued their fellowship project into a govtech startup. Tiffany and Danny did pursue a govtech startup (which has become really successful, yay Danny and Tiff!) but did not wish to carry on with Citygram. City of Charlotte wanted the software to run, and Code for Charlotte was in a good position to begin operating the Ruby-based installation in place at Heroku. That's how Code for Charlotte became the first brigade to carry on with a fellowship project. We do receive funds from the City of Charlotte to operate the site and support it as data is updated.
Before that transition had officially occurred, Citygram.nyc was born as one of the first domains under the .nyc domain in New York. Unlike many other Code for America applications which have a "redeploy" style model, with each locality operating its own installation, Citygram was architected to be deployed once. We saw no reason to hold up NYC at the time.
Launch cities were San Francisco, Seattle, Lexington, and City of Charlotte.
Added Tulsa, Austin, Raleigh/Durham/Cary, and San Diego
In Fall of 2015, Citygram won the Code for America Technology Award in the Brigade Category.
Added Orlando, Edmonton, and Chattanooga