“But we’ll get there,” Johnson said.
The White House turned to a civic pioneer, Jen Pahlka, to lead the Presidential Innovation Fellows program to the next level in 2013, its second year.32 Pahlka had made her name through Code for America, an endeavor that demands considerable exploration here, because it embodies so many of the concepts in this book: people pulling together to solve problems; working with government rather than against it; using nontraditional lean startup methods; and getting out of the traditional boxes and arguments to enrich the lives of others, as well as their own—often in unexpected ways.
I first met Pahlka when she was working for TechWeb. We were at a 2009 conference meant to foster greater collaboration between government professionals and their traditional contractors—which had been on one side—and a new breed of social media entrepreneurs in the Beltway area that potentially could offer added functionality and lesser cost. At the time, she viewed these relationships optimistically, expressing her belief that if these parties simply became more aware of each other, they would share information in a way that would benefit everyone. (There were others who took a more jaundiced view of these relationships. Vivek Kundra would represent that perspective in a New York Times op-ed he wrote after leaving his position as the nation’s CIO.33 In making a case for companies that operate with newer technologies like cloud computing, he called out an “I.T. cartel” of powerful private contractors that make government dependent on “inefficient software and hardware that is expensive to acquire and to maintain.”)
By our next meeting, at the Gov 2.0 Expo in May 2010, Pahlka had decided to blend her optimism with activism, still believing the government was capable of smarter acquisition and usage of technology, but no longer willing to wait for that to occur on its own. She invited me to join private sector technology leaders—including Tim O’Reilly, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Twitter founder Biz Stone—in a public service video to recruit for her inaugural class of Code for America fellows.34 She aimed to attract the most promising people in the technology field; to fan them out to cities (initially eight); and pair them with able, underutilized public servants to address localized issues. The video was called “What If,” and its participants posed questions like this: “What if some of the most talented designers and technologists in the country applied those talents to building web apps that work for cities and for citizens?”
After 362 people applied for the 2011 fellowship, she chose 20 with a mix of skill sets, but all with track records of results. The passion to serve was assumed—after all, the annual stipend was a modest $35,000, plus health care benefits and some travel expenses. Pahlka viewed the program as a Peace Corps for technologists, one requiring a finite commitment of 11 months. The time constraint applied healthy pressure to accomplish something significant before the music stopped and a new crop of fellows, with their own perspectives and projects, came along to replace them. As an Eric Ries disciple, Pahlka adhered to the lean startup philosophy by emphasizing speed at every stage. “Let’s put something up that will teach us something about the problem, instead of spending two years defining it, then three years prototyping, and by the time you’re ready to address the problem, it’s just out of date,” she said.
The specific problems differed depending on the city, yet Pahlka came to view many in a common context: as persisting or worsening due to a disconnect between government and its people and, in turn, serving to deepen that disconnect. Pahlka analogized government to a smart phone: government costs far more than such a device, through the collection of taxes, and yet if it doesn’t provide the features and services promised, there’s no remedy. There’s no receipt or warranty to use to get it fixed or replaced. There’s no satisfaction, at least until the next election. And even then, there’s little confidence among the consumers—the citizens—much will be different. Above all, Pahlka saw a desperate need to repair that relationship, and restore some of that confidence, so citizens feel compelled to contribute rather than just complain, lending a hand as well as a voice.
“What I realized is it’s not about transparency to hold government accountable, it’s about transparency to sell the value of government to citizens, and to sell citizens that they are able to be involved in this process,” Pahlka said. “In the absence of the access to that information, citizens are going to assume that the government isn’t going to do anything. That’s the basic building block of this enormous distrust between citizens and government that is killing our country. If we are able to create interfaces that are simple, beautiful, and easy to use and open the door, you start to have people caring about government and wanting to support it, instead of hating it and wanting to take it down.”
Pahlka ran into some resistance, because cities aren’t monolithic institutions, and some officials are invested in the status quo, concerned about any change that might somehow decrease their value or simply scared of new technology they assume to be overly complex. Still, she said that pushback was “much less than you would think,” and credits that to a model that calls for cities to self-identify some need for change, and to making the technology as understandable as possible to city officials.
“Let them own it as their agenda, let them find their own way that they can express it in their community, and then tell that story,” Pahlka said. “Then you’re sort of creating all these allies. Does that always work? No. You’ve still got people who want to see the current system persist—the current way of doing things—because they’re waiting for retirement. But I would say in general, public servants in the United States are far and away one of biggest undervalued resources in our country. Treat them as such. ‘You’re the key to this. You went into public service to serve the public. This is a way you can do that better.’ Tap into what got them into the field in the first place. And I think it actually goes pretty well.”
Pahlka observed that, after working with Code for America, some government officials take different approaches to problems, more “consistent with government as a platform—different skill sets that they’re hiring for, different positions they may create, very often different policies, especially around data. It can mean a whole host of things that can signal true institutional change. We’re really building a network of local government leaders and community agents to care about this agenda and can support each other and work with each other. We want to tell those stories and spread those kind of outcomes as well, not just the applications but the organizational and institutional changes.”
During the first two years of Code for America, the encouraging stories occurred all over the map, with one even off the U.S. mainland. The team sent to Honolulu, Hawaii, in 2012 encountered a common deficiency in city government, unacceptable at this stage of the Internet era: an unwieldly, exasperating website, one that sent residents down rabbit holes of useless text, outdated information, and broken links. This also stressed city staffers, forced to field flurries of angry calls from those who couldn’t find content buried deep on that site. Recognizing the folly in attempting to rewrite an entire website in a few months, a former Yahoo employee named Sheba Najmi and the other fellows borrowed an interface from gov.UK, checked the search logs of honolulu.gov to find the 10 most common questions (“how do I get a new driver’s license?”), and provided a search box that linked to the appropriate answers and forms. The team also recognized that 10 answers would not suffice so, in partnership with the city, it called a civic Write-a-Thon. That meant inviting officials and citizens to rise early on a Saturday to spend three hours in a government office to, in Najmi’s words, “rewrite government.” Nearly 60 people participated, posing questions and writing more than 120 total response “articles” in simple jargonless language, as if explaining to a neighbor. Many of those made it to the Honolulu Answers site, such as a page providing the prescription for a local dilemma: “What do I do about wild roosters?”35
Pahlka saw more value in t
his inclusive, collaborative, incremental solution than in the fellows rewriting the website on their own. “They’ve got the community now involved in it, and wanting to make it better all the time,” she said. “You start to create social norms, to say, yes, government is something we do together. I don’t just pay taxes and vote, I am an active participant helping to make our community work. That’s really, in the end, what we’re going for. That’s the real outcome of government as a platform beyond first-class notions of transparency and efficiency and participation.”
What does this engagement look like? Sometimes, it looks low tech, such as a Santa Cruz man painting photos of bicycles on lockers so riders would know the lockers were meant for them. Sometimes, it means citizens looking for hydrants or tsunami sirens or storm drains to “adopt”—entering their information on an application, clicking on a map, and then checking to make sure the key service is working properly in an era of strapped city budgets. “Money’s tight, and no one is checking these sirens anymore,” Pahlka said. “The city’s not going to do it. Who does it? You do.”
The engagement also looks like what started happening in Philadelphia, when citizens were given new ways to influence the city’s plans for the future. The city had invited in-person feedback one evening per month to influence elements of its 2035 plan. Predictably, that once-a-month schedule generated negligible and unbalanced interest, not representative of the populace: many single mothers, for instance, couldn’t regularly spare two hours at some meeting. Code for America’s fellows leveraged technology to bring the questions to the people, posing them on posters in strategic locations such as transit stops: asking riders, for instance, to text to a “yes” or “no” number, indicating whether they would like to see a line extended. For city planners with a simple log-in, this is a means of cheaply, quickly, accurately soliciting and compiling citizens’ opinions. “You can get hundreds and hundreds of people answering one question, instead of 20 people answering all of their questions,” Pahlka said. That application, like many in the Code for America portfolio, is being scaled, or studied for scaling, in several other cities.
Finally, the engagement looks like what’s happening in New Orleans, and a story—BlightStatus—that is especially emblematic of Pahlka’s vision, and the tenets of this book.
Seven years after Hurricane Katrina, one of America’s most unique and culturally vibrant cities was still holding on to a much more dubious distinction: ranking among America’s three most blighted, fraught with foreclosures, and abandoned, crumbling edifices.36 City officials were acutely aware of the problem, and many, including the new mayor, Mitch Landrieu, were intent on addressing it. He had made post-Katrina demolition and restoration a priority of his administration, even establishing monthly BlightSTAT meetings, through which the city could give its citizens a macro sense of how many houses were being repaired or demolished, with a goal of reducing the city’s blight count by 10,000 by 2014. But, on the whole, the city still wasn’t capably communicating to its citizens what it was attempting to accomplish.
“So to the people of New Orleans, it’s just a mess,” Pahlka said. “You come home one day, and something’s been demolished, and you had no idea that was going to happen, you had no input into it, you weren’t able to signal that, in fact, a different property on your block was really a problem. And you cannot really find out what’s going on through that process.”
As 2012 Code for America fellows, Eddie Tejeda, Amir Reavis-Bey, Alex Pandel, and Serena Wales would be responsible for abating those frustrations. They had attended different colleges, before pursuing different careers in different corners of the country: Tejeda, a software engineer in the civic technology space; Pandel, a graphic designer with a degree in studio art and work featured in magazines; Reavis-Bey, a technologist for Wall Street investment banking firms; and Wales, a web developer working with museums, nonprofits, and corporations.37 They shared only a strong interest in service, beating out roughly 550 others to earn four of the 26 spots in Code for America’s 2012 class. They spent four weeks working together in San Francisco, receiving crash courses in municipal government, civic technology, and design. Then the quartet shipped off to New Orleans, a city two had never previously visited, to bond in close quarters. There, they took the pulse of the people, outside and inside government, hearing how blight was affecting neighborhoods, interactions, and lives and learning what citizens were doing and what they wanted done. They encountered frustration in every corner and on all sides, whether from overwhelmed government staffers, underappreciated community leaders, or beaten-down citizens, frustration that had virtually paralyzed conversation and progress. And they began to understand how much this issue mattered, and the desperate need to close the information divide.
There was the woman from the Bunny Friend Neighborhood Association Inc., who spent several hours every night monitoring and chronicling the conditions of properties. She was so appreciative of the fellows listening, understanding, and attempting to assist that she hugged them. “You’ve got people who have lived there for their whole lives; they are fighting to make their communities work, they are fighting to be able to create the kind of communities they want to live in,” Pahlka said. “And they cannot be partners to the city government in that fight if they don’t have the access to some basic information and in a way that they can understand that information. They had just felt shut out. After years of being shut out, the door is now open. To someone who cares very deeply about fixing their neighborhood, that’s an emotional moment for them. To be told, we’re now going to collaborate with you on what happens to these blighted houses on your block, instead of just doing it to you, they feel validated, they feel hopeful, and they feel like they are now in a dialogue with the set of services that people are providing them.”
There was the woman from Mid-City who kept photographs, printouts, letters, and complaints and consequences, largely unsatisfactory. Tejeda recalled her being “really tense” and even “angry at times,” as she frantically flipped through a gargantuan, archaic, offline contraption. “It made me realize, ‘Wow, this is how she stores information, in this binder, and here she is, stressed out, trying to find some piece of information,’” Tejeda said. “And a lot of this information, when we talked to people at City Hall, existed already, and it was in digital form.”
The Code for America team sought to free these activists from unnecessarily pounding the pavement, pens in hand, to uncover what officials already knew, to allow them to invest their energy in helping to push properties through the blight process. The team also wanted to create conditions for a more constructive conversation, giving citizens and city staff the means to access the most specific and accurate information, and allowing them to recast their relationship as collaborators rather than adversaries—more common ground and common sense, less wasted time. They wanted to empower citizens to click on a specific property, point it out at one of those BlightSTAT meetings, and ask why a scheduled inspection hadn’t occurred, instead of making some generalized accusation. “These questions are actually a lot easier for the city officials to answer,” Tejeda said. “They can say, ‘Oh, that guy was sick that day so he couldn’t make it.’ In terms of the relationship, it’s much easier for citizens to communicate with city officials. Instead of frustration, yelling at each other, demanding things.”
This is where technology came in.
“The main point is all of this information already existed in city hall,” Pandel said. “We thought that clearly the format the information is in, in the city, is not working for citizens.”
The team presented several basic concepts to the stakeholders at city hall, learning what was legal, feasible, and most critical. Then, back in the Bay Area, it reunited with fellow fellows, brainstorming with them about their projects while getting feedback on the blight work. The team returned to New Orleans to start testing a minimum viable product, one that would leverage ope
n government, pulling from more than a dozen data sets to give citizens greater knowledge of the city’s activities related to properties already reported. Less than five months later, the team officially launched the BlightStatus site at the monthly BlightSTAT meeting. It took five minutes to demonstrate how the application worked: how citizens could enter an address and receive a current status report of “Inspection” or “Notification” or “Hearing” or “Judgment” or “Foreclosure” or “Demolition,” how they could sort by case status, and how they could scroll through the map. The team knew its application could be useful to citizens (clean format), staffers (less reliant on other departments, better able to answer questions), and planners (conceiving strategies to reduce citywide blight). Still, the response surprised them. “I remember when we got to the map page—that sort of showed all of the properties that currently had in ‘open case’—people literally gasped and started to applaud, because I think they realized, ‘Oh, so now I can basically have a BlightSTAT meeting in my home anytime,’” Pandel said. “They get the statistics now in real time, at their fingertips, instead of having to wait for the city to manually compile a report and hold this public meeting. So it was really very cool. It felt very rewarding.”
The meetings continued in the city and still served a purpose, especially for those without Internet access. But the fellows had used technology to give the citizens more options, not through big government, but through making a big problem seem a bit smaller, more personal, more manageable.
“People cared overall about the overarching climate of how blight was being tackled in the city, but they want to know what’s happening on their block, they want to know what’s happening on the street around the corner, the properties that affect them directly,” Reavis-Bey said. “So people were superexcited all over the place. People were interrupting the meeting, saying, ‘Oh wow, I am looking right now, and I can see that this property was inspected, this property is in a hearing.’ People were just really, really thrilled; it was as if the lights had been turned on.”
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