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Code for America matches technology professionals to grassroots needs.
Dealing with complexity, reeling from the recession, digging for efficiencies — these challenges are not unique to business. Government faces the same ones. A new organization in San Francisco, with backing from Microsoft, Google, the Rockefeller Foundation, and others, aims to help by pairing talented web programmers with city governments to tackle specific local projects.
“We’re like ‘Teach for America’ for geeks,” says Jennifer Pahlka, Code for America’s (CfA) founder. The organization’s 20 fellows, selected from an applicant pool of over 300, began their year-long fellowships last month.
“We selected these individuals based on their skills in technology, design, and deployment, but also because they can see a problem, address it, and get something out there incredibly quickly. That agility, and speed, and can-do attitude are desperately needed in city governments. They’re desperately needed in all levels of government, but it’s easier to engage them at the city level, and easier for them to have an impact. We’re calling to their better instincts, to their ideas about public service, saying ‘You can come do this for a year, you’ll be able to have a huge impact, and help change how our government works.’”
Fellows are working in Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. Every solution they develop will be shared with other cities. For example, a database system for tracking street addresses (essential for numerous services, from picking up trash to assessing and collecting tax revenue) developed in San Francisco, is being finessed by CfA so other cities can use it as open source software.
“Each project has to meet our model,” says Pahlka. “It has to be a web application that enable cities to better connect their constituents, reduce administrative costs, and support more transparent government, and it has to be shareable with other cities.” Projects will be completed in November and then made available to the public. A new group of fellows takes to the streets the following January.
You might call it harder working government: a way to help cities provide their services to citizens.
“On the first day the fellows got together they shared their hopes for their fellowships. One of them said, ‘I’d like to make government interfaces beautiful, simple, and easy to use.’ Others talked about making government work the way citizens want it to, a more accurate reflection of how we live our lives and the experiences we want to have,” says Pahlka.
This year’s CfA projects include a web platform to use Boston’s educational services to better engage students; an open source mechanism for Philadelphia citizens to collaborate on activities related to neighborhood services; a way for Seattle citizens to work with one another and public safety officials to make neighborhoods safer; and a how-to manual to enable other local governments to replicate D.C.’s work with open data programs.
Pahlka believes the cities who applied for the first groups of CfA fellows are “a little brave, since it’s our first year, and they must have some vision, right? The cities have to pay a fee to cover the stipends for the fellows.” In many cases, CfA fellows took substantial pay cuts to code for the public good.
“By applying to the Code for America program it means these cities are committing to this program as a mechanism for change, and that means that they want to change. They see that something needs to be done differently, and they’re willing to take a step in that direction to make it happen.”
Filed under: 360 Magazine, Featured Articles
