Announcing the Summer Jobs+ Code Sprint

UPDATE: The deadline for the Summer Jobs+ Code Sprint has been extended until Monday, April 16 at 8:00 a.m. EDT.

Today we’re announcing the first ever White House Code Sprint. This is a call to developers around the country to use the Summer Jobs+ API to build job search apps for your favorite browsers, social networking platforms, smart phones and feature phones. Submit your apps using this form by Monday April 16^th at 8 a.m. EST, and we’ll pick the most innovative ones to feature on WhiteHouse.gov.

Summer Jobs+ is an initiative of the White House and the Department of Labor to provide low-income and disconnected youth, ages 16-24, access to summer jobs, internships, mentorships and training opportunities. Over the last three months companies throughout the nation have been making commitments to provide opportunities to support the country’s next generation workforce. These commitments have been tagged using the Job Posting standard established by schema.org creating an open database of summer opportunities.

We’re excited to tap the collective knowledge and innovation of the app developer community. Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems said it best when he said, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” Some ideas we’d love to see include an easy way to receive job opportunities through SMS, localized job search apps for the city you live in, map based interfaces or easy ways to create summer training playlists that help youth plan a summer of job skills development. These are just a few of our ideas but we’re confident that you have even better ones so get coding, and we’ll feature the most innovative apps on WhiteHouse.gov.

Brian Forde is Advisor to the CTO on Mobile and Data Innovation