WASHINGTON – With cities facing painful budget cuts, already-strapped government technology teams risk falling even further behind their private sector peers.
But if one pioneering technology non-profit has its way, government IT needn’t be relegated to a civic state of shock.
Modeled after Teach for America, a program that sends the brightest recent college grads to failing public schools to teach for two years, Code for America matches some of the country’s top young technologists with city governments for one year. Its goal is to develop innovative, cost-saving web-based technologies aimed at making government more accountable, connected and efficient. In many cases, CfA fellows take large pay cuts to code for good.
“We believe that the most talented web developers, designers, researchers, et cetera, all of these folks are really needed to rebuild the connections between government and its citizens,” said CfA founder and executive director Jennifer Pahlka at an informational Webinar last week.
“Right now, I think our top talent is going to places like Facebook, or other potentially world-changing startups. And I think that’s a great way to have an impact, but we want to show that there are other ways to change the world that have a huge public benefit and really can strengthen our public institutions.”
Imagine, for a moment, city council members in Pittsburgh generating instant polls at monthly meetings to determine whether constructing a skateboard park is more important to residents than preserving the green space.
Or Atlanta’s mayor efficiently tapping into blogs maintained by his constituents to visualize a diverse set of trending topics in the community and then addressing them in order of actual rather than perceived importance.
Those are just a couple of the myriad technologies that CfA fellows could design for cities.
The program, envisioned in September 2009 by Pahlka, a business-to-business technology media veteran, announced its first class of 20 fellows in early November. The fellows, carefully selected from an applicant pool of more than 360, will begin working with city officials in Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle and Washington, D.C., starting in January.
“We’re focused on local and city government because we think that’s where the most change can happen in an immediate and rapid way,” said Abhi Nemani, CfA’s director of strategy and communications. “All levels of government have problems, but city problems, we can put a face on and find the power players and decision makers to solve them right away.”
The developers will spend next year working together in San Francisco, five to a city and feeding off one another’s creative juices. In February, they’ll travel to their respective cities to meet with officials and mingle with residents. After working transparently and collaboratively with the city government throughout the year, the projects will wrap up in November and be made open-source and available to the public. Each year, new fellows and cities will be selected to perpetuate the project with the ultimate goal of creating a public technology infrastructure that is compatible nationwide.
“I see myself as this first wave of people diving into this whole new field and there’s the potential for this whole really interesting public sector of neighborhood specific software to come about,” said Max Ogden, 21, who will be developing technology solutions for the city of Boston.
Boston’s project, which tasks Fellows to develop an ecosystem of applications that allow public schools students to tap into all of the educational opportunities that the city offers, will be the first of its kind in the country.
The initiative will coincide with the recent launch of the BostONEcard, a single, scannable student ID card that monitors school attendance and grades while also providing access to public transit, public libraries and after-school programs at local community centers.
An example application, envisioned at a CfA brainstorm and described at last week’s Webinar, has the potential to provide both an interactive and reactive learning experience.
Say a history teacher is passionate about John Adams and wants to design a lesson plan around his years in Boston. She could work hand-in-hand with a CfA fellow to design a location-based social networking type app, like Foursquare, that would allow students to “check-in” at historical places Adams had been linked to across the city. The experience would not only provide out-of-class learning, but then could be analyzed to determine whether students who participated scored higher on subsequent history tests or increased their school attendance. And the benefits don’t end there.
“If there were events that were held that were extremely beneficial to kids and now we have a better mechanism to view that, that would be an important part of it,” said Boston Chief Information Officer Bill Oates, who explained that apps shown to increase student learning or engagement could be distributed and implemented across the entire school district.
“We want to make learning for students in our city more accessible, more engaging and more expansive, and figure out how do we actually make our libraries, our community centers and our schools places where they’re seeking out educational opportunities,” said Chris Osgood, a co-chair in the Boston mayor’s office of New Urban Mechanics.
CfA is currently accepting applications for cities interested in participating during the 2012 cycle. For more information, visit codeforamerica.org.
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