Red tape? They can hack it
Code for America team building apps to help streamline bureaucracy
LOS ANGELES — On recent day at work in a San Francisco loft, Moncef Belyamani was sporting a hipster “LOVE” Tshirt and riffing, with obsessive detail, on the evolution of vinyl record production.
TheAndroid coder and sometime danceclub DJ wrapped up by explaining how Google’s language translator could be rigged to produce an excellent beat- box.
Belyamani isn’t exactly the kind of guy you expect to bump into in a government building. But if you happen to be hanging out in San Mateo County offices, that’s exactly where you’ll find him many days.
The 38- year- old is part of an experiment in municipal government driven by hackers like him who want to help make the public sector as responsive as the Yelp app on a smartphone.
From their buzzy loft, these 28 tech wizards spend their days tapping on laptops, scribbling formulas into spiral notebooks and “ideating” — hacker- speak for tossing ideas around. Then they fan out across the country, embedding themselves within the beige conference rooms, dense procedure manuals and maddeningly slow pace of the machinery of municipal government.
They call themselves the Peace Corps for Geeks.
Code for America, as the nonprofit they work for is called, condensed itsimprobable mission down to a few words in its recent annual report: use technology to make government “simple, beautiful, easy to use.”
In Boston, for example, thousands of hydrants were getting buried in snowstorms, obstructing firefighters. A Code for America hacker built an app so Bostonians could “adopt” a hydrant and agree to keep the snowoff it. The app isn’t just functional. It’s fun. Itwent viral.
Honolulu seized on it. Folks there adopt tsunami sirens, keeping their batteries fresh. Seattle citizens began adopting storm drains to unclog. At least nine cities have built on Code for America’s work to create “Adopt- a” apps. It’s as the group intended: Thecode is open source, and anybody interested is encouraged to rehack it.
Make a difference
Rarely do things work so organically in the public sector, a place of rigid org charts, layers of contracting rules and bewildering cost overruns. There are bureaucracies within bureaucracies and computers so old that nobody makes the parts anymore.
Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka readily acknowledges the inherent contradiction:
“I started a program to try to get the rock- star tech and design people to take a year off and work in the one environment that represents pretty much everything they’re supposed to hate.”
TheCodeforAmericafellows, as they are called, have been lured to this aggressively unhip domain byPahlka, aBay Area innovation fanatic.
Hers is a quintessential California story. The charismatic 43- year- oldYale grad from Maryland fell into the tech world by happenstance and built a brand around evangelizing outside- the- box thinking.
Pahlka easily blends with any other activist you might bump into at a Berkeley farmers market. She has a taste for eclectic patterned clothing, singer- songwriters and sustainable agriculture. But her lack of conceit is disarming. Light conversations with her quickly become intense.
OnethingPahlka doesn’tknowhowtodo is code. It’s her “dirty little secret,” she jokes.
But that doesn’t matter to some of the most talented coders in the world, who insist few people better grasp its possibilities.
It bothers
Pahlka
that
people
can
perform complex financial transactions across continents on a smartphone but often can’t get a municipal parking permit without a longwait at CityHall.
She had previously run from government, after working in a social services agency and finding little room for new ideas. “I felt like Iwas part of a broken system,” she said.
She left to travel Asia, and upon her return the only job she could find was organizing conferences. Her task was to set up events for gaming coders. Her taste for big ideas and tearing down institutional borders served her well there, and she caught the attention of tech industry giants.
By 2008, someof her mentorswere being tapped by the incoming Obama administration. Their mandate in Washington was to export the methods of lean tech startups to lumbering federal bureaucracies.
But for all the big ideas being bandied aboutWashington, it stillwasn’t getting easier to get a parking permit. A friend who worked for the mayor of Tucson kept impressing upon her how a few cleverly designed apps could reshape a city’s relationship with residents.
Pahlka persuaded the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit focused on harnessing technology to make government more transparent, to give her $ 10,000 in seed money to explore the concept. Other foundations, including Google’s, would later line up with much bigger checks.
WhiteHouse notices
Pahlka was soon putting the word out in the public sector that local governments could apply to bring a team of hackers on board for the year. Cities would commit to paying $ 60,000 to cover a stipend and expenses for each fellow they bring on. By 2011, she was embedding coders in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, D. C. — and Code for America became amovement.
The White House has noticed Code for America’s triumphs. In May, Pahlka announced she was leaving for a year to help direct government innovation efforts for the Obama administration.
Before she left, Pahlka embedded three teams in California. In Oakland, the task is getting the public faster and better access to government records. In San Francisco and in SanMateo County, hackers are trying to figure outhowto help enrollmore residents for social services, particularly food stamps.
“If you look at what they did elsewhere, it involved some of the big, hairy, audacious goals of government,” said Beverly Beasley Johnson, director of the SanMateo County Human Services Agency. “But they reached them just by bringing in fresh eyes and adopting a simple, easy- to- use approach. We are looking for that.”
She said the partnership can be tricky: “You have to be willing to be very open, to let them see everything— the good, the bad, the ugly— and do what they do.”