Code for America

Jennifer Pahlka leads Code for America, which she calls something like a Teach for America or Peace Corp for geeks. The organization pairs techies, coders, designers and data wranglers with municipal governments to build apps that help connect citizens with public services and with each other.

The project starts with the premise that both technology and government are platforms for collective action. In that light, updating government's traditionally lagging approach to digital technology might have a big impact in terms of engagement with grassroots community projects.

The hope is that government can learn a few tricks from Internet and start-up culture - being permissionless and open, crowd-sourcing. Pahlka spoke at the conference Strata yesterday on helping government become more data-driven (Moneyballing Government).

Code for America seems to like trying lots of quick experimental projects to see what sticks. Some of these include:

• Open Data Santa Cruz
• Streamline business permitting process
• Code for America fellow Marcin Wichary went to jail to help find data driven ways to determine whether charged criminals should be jailed pending trail or released and what bail should be set.
• Developing civic APIs
• Navigate the Boston public school system

Rebooting government

Politics may be broken beyond any individuals ability to fix. technology can lower the barrier to entry letting more people lend a hand to help the day-to-day business of government run better. In Pahlka's vision, this involves setting aside politics and contempt for bureaucracy and realizing that we are not just consumers of public services. By using our hands rather than our voices, we end up strengthening civil society.

Our contempt for bureaucracy keeps bureaucracy working against us. Maybe it's better to occupy the SEC than Wall Street.

She concludes her 2012 TED talk Coding a better government with the observation that “We're not going to fix government until we fix citizenship.” and asks, “Are we just a crowd of voices, or are we a crowd of hands?”