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Code for America: Think global, code local

Code for America invites developers to innovate in the public interest

By Andrew C. Oliver, InfoWorld, 04/18/13

Recently I was forced to interact with my local government. This involved several pieces of paper being signed and notarized, as well as multiple trips in person to nondescript offices. My staff had to shepherd me around town and calm me down while I dealt with my psychological rejection to all things that require my participation in monotony ("seriously, isn't there an app for this?").

I am not alone in my personal pain. All around the country, small businesses and individuals struggle with a special kind of divide: Local government hasn't joined the digital generation. In a fast-moving, complex world like ours, how can we have effective and responsive local governance if our local government still prints things and puts them into file cabinets as a primary means of data management?

A group called Code for America is looking to change all this by bringing Internet technologies to your local government and the world. I spoke with Catherine Bracy, the International Program Manager for Code for America, about the organization's efforts and her efforts specifically. While Code for America has been working for a few years domestically, Catherine is responsible for helping internationalize the software and programs it has already developed.

You can find out more about Catherine Bracy specifically in my personal blog or follow her on Twitter at @cbracy -- or Code For America generally at @codeforamerica.

The problem at hand
When someone says "for America" or "government," the conversation devolves quickly into an ideological discussion about the size of government and how much or how little it should do. Such debates typically focus on big federal government spending priorities like defense and health care.

By contrast, much of what local government does affects you every day -- things like sanitation, sewage, and sidewalks. There's little ideological debate about that stuff, but also little accessible information, in part due to the antiquated ways local government collects and publishes data and how it deals with functional issues.

As Catherine put it: "A lot of times what democracy looks like is: 'Did my trash get picked up on time?' or 'Can I figure out how to register for food stamps?' That's the kind of stuff Code for America works on ... bureaucracy and service delivery. And those are the really important, nonsexy things that we need to fix in order to restore confidence in our government and in democracy."

The big idea
According to Catherine, "If you look at what is really dangerous about the pace of innovation in government, over time, if it doesn't start speeding up, it is just going to get further and further away from what is happening in every other aspect of people's lives."

She continued: "People are used to interacting with technology in a way that is easy and well-designed and simple and elegant. When they hit an interaction with government and it is not that way, it breeds mistrust and cynicism and disconnection. By bringing the best of private-sector agile development and user-centered design, we can make government as easy to navigate and as intuitive as any customer app that people use in their private lives, and in so doing re-engage people and the public good."

For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.