It’s 9:30pm. Made a vow to myself, and everyone else, that I would just get what happened today “down” - even if just snippets and highlights.
First day of Code for America!
Got up extra early today, because I absolutely did not want to have the possibility of being late for today - the kickoff day of Code for America. I had been waiting for this day for months, after moving back to the Bay Area from Minneapolis. Massive ramp up.
Our building is a cool office building near 2nd and Mission. The office had previously been used by Moto, who designed the software for the Flip cams. There are supposed to be weird random notes and relics from their design process and I can’t wait to see some. There are cool cubby holes, long tables we can all work at, and little office spaces. It’s a great space. Awesome things are going to happen there.
The Code for America staff greeted us, with tons of sparkling enthusiasm. Tim O’Reilly was there too. He hung out with us all day. David Eaves - civic hacking community organizer extraordinaire - organized a full day of get-to-know-yous.
We shared our goals and visions for the year. Lots of us have similar and overlapping hopes - that we make a difference, that what we do lives on, that we are able to make tools that the cities will use and build upon.
We shared our concerns and fears. There were many. But these were fears we all had, and really they aren’t that much different than those you might face working in any other complex organization. Overall, I feel like I’m setting off to face something very unknown with a team of incredibly smart and diversely talented & compassionate people.
Later in the day, though, one of the fellows, Ryan Resella, talked about his own transformation from skeptical city software maker to a local government advocate. He said we should take what we thought about city governments (you know, the labyrinthine bureaucracies that make any of us want to run the other way) - and that we should toss it out the window. Basically approach the cities and absorb what is there. I’m excited about this.
The Code for America team took some time to answer some of our basic questions, normal things you might expect us to ask like ‘is the city our client?’ - Overall, the answer to this question was: we are just a totally different model unlike anything cities normally work with. And that’s what we are here to do, bring our expertise in other ways of working outside of government systems - to help cities get more done with less money.
At lunch, we got to have a fireside chat with Tim O’Reilly. My favorite question was Joel’s point-blank “So, Tim, how do you become a thought leader?” To which he replied (gross paraphrasing here — my own take) - that you need to see the matrix of what’s going on that people aren’t seeing (this was the deeper thought that I need to think about some more) - and then he had some other concrete advice about creating a shared vision.
6 or 7 fellows did personal ignites - just informal talks about themselves. This was really heartening to hear just how much knowledge is present among us. I liked Max Ogden’s story about “Cat mapper” - how he was making high def videos of cats in his neighborhood. Then, at a local civic hack night, a woman from the city came and she was like “Oh, I need to track feral cats.” So the moral of the story: even the most whimsical of apps can have a practical application.
You never know, and you can’t ever know unless you mix up the people and get them to cross-pollinate.
Then we built Ikea chairs.
Near the end of the day, we had a closing circle. It was great. We all sat in a circle on the ground and talking about our feelings. It was definitely emotional in that many of us have dreamed of having an opportunity to do good with our technology for a really, really long time. I remember that after high school I really had wanted to do City Year. But I went to college instead and I’ve sort of regretted it ever since. But I also wasn’t as interested in building with wood and nails. I’m way more interested in building with computers, cause that’s what I do.
So it is just incredible that all these passionate people have come together.
What I shared about what I was taking away from the day: we had talked about the idea of making hackable platforms (this is sort of related to “Government as a Platform” but slightly different.) - basically, that we will design SO THAT the city can modify it.
This is sort of different to how I had previously been thinking, though I of course totally adore this model as I like all projects that are organized this way. It just works, a lot of the time. The difference being building something that *could* be modified versus building something that *should* be modified. And not just modified, but more that we are making foundational building blocks.
OK, losing my ability to explain this one. I’ll have to come back to it. But overall, I’m excited that we all have these high standards and expectations - I don’t think that we will let each other down. The only way forward to to deal with anything scary head on and go through it.
It’s going to be awesome.