Code For America Offers Young Web Developers A Chance to Bring Cities to the Web 2.0

Take a minute and look at your city government’s webpage. Is there anywhere for you to share input? Is there an app you can download to your phone to provide feedback or submit a request? If it looks anything like my city’s website, probably not and you might be worried that your city and its dozens of downloadable tax forms are trapped in 2001. Don’t worry.  Web 2.0 will soon be on its way to city hall, if one Bay Area-based nonprofit has its way.

Code for America is nonprofit with a “start-up mentality,” according to founder and executive director Jennifer Pahlka. Now preparing for the first year of its program, the organization hopes to identify city-level projects that could benefit from web-based solutions and bring together teams to make them a reality. To do so, CFA recruits developers, designers, and project managers with a desire for public service to serve as fellows on its city-level teams. These fellows serve one-year terms with CFA, which will take them all the way from training to the implementation of a web-application in one of CFA’s partner cities.

CFA partnered with five cities for its first year: Boston, Boulder, the District of Columbia, Philadelphia, and Seattle. Those cities will cover the many of costs of building the application over the 11-month project, including their fellows’ stipends and cost of living during their month-long stay during the implementation process. In return, the cities will receive a web application built to their specifications as well as access to the applications built for the other CFA partner cities.

Boston’s decision to participate in CFA wasn’t a surprise. Nigel Jacob, the co-chair of the Mayor’s Office for New Urban Mechanics in Boston met Pahlka at an event in Washington, D.C., last October. He liked the idea of CFA enough to write a letter in support of the organization’s application for 501(c)3 status. Since then, he has worked with CFA staff to build and modify the program for which Boston was selected to participate.

Jacob already has ideas for the CFA fellows who will begin working with his office next year with a focus on helping public and private institutions work together more efficiently. He says hopes that the fellows can create “a framework for data-sharing that can be used both by our local government departments and private nonprofits for the purpose of sharing data on how they deliver services to some of our most challenged inner city neighborhoods.” He also wants to use that same framework to generate interest and involvement in the subsequent ongoing project from community members, which city hall will ultimately need if the project is to succeed.

CFA’s emphasis on web 2.0, which is based on user-centered content, interoperability, and feedback, will require some rethinking of the relationship between citizen and city hall.

“It's all about re-inventing the way that residents can experience life in the city,” says Jacob. “Anything that can make it easier to engage-in, find, comment-on, or experiment with the City has huge potential application.”

Jacob sees a great opportunity for innovation in Boston’s CFA involvement, but he also realizes that cities are taking a risk by partnering with an organization with no track record. Still, he believes that this first group of partner cities are “blazing a trail” for what will be the future of local government as more Millennials make their way into public service.

“I think that what we're seeing is the result of a generational shift in these cities,” says Jacob. “Younger people are going to work in local government and have different attitudes towards technology, especially social media.”

This nonprofit may only be part of a larger trend in government, but Pahlka and CFA aren’t waiting around for some tidal wave of web 2.0 to reach government.

“Just like the projects we’re developing, the organization itself is a start-up,” says Pahlka. “That means we’re just getting underway, but we’re not waiting to have an impact. We’ve working with five large cities, and they are expecting us to deliver five polished applications, and we have to deliver.”

Making good on the organization’s promise will require the work of skilled fellows trained to take their projects from whiteboard to live in under a year. CFA will select 20 to 25 participants, and it has already received more than 150 applications. The deadline for fellow applications is August 15. According to Pahlka, the application “focuses on contributions to past projects: We want people who have proven to be able to work together well and get the job done.” She anticipates the selection process will be competitive and she has been “consistently impressed with the caliber of applications.”

Ryan Kellett applied to be a CFA fellow next year after hearing about the program via Twitter. Kellett, who graduated from Middlebury College in January 2010, says  “some sort of one or two-year service work post-college is important for freshly minted graduates,” adding that Teach for America (TFA) has done well to promote the model. But TFA wasn’t for Kellett, who cited recent criticism of the organization due to “too many graduates applying for prestige rather than genuine interest.”

In contrast, Kellett says CFA is “a bit more pure in talent and mission, attracting only those who really are invested in local government and technology.”

CFA fellows will spend January 2011 undergoing hands-on training and guest lectures from experts in technology and public administration. The hope is to prepare fellows “to make sure they meet their deadlines throughout the year,” according to Pahlka. To make that happen, they will learn about the challenges of negotiating municipal government and promoting innovation at the local level.

When their first month is complete, the fellows will set up camp in the Bay Area, where they will work with their respective team and city to develop the application over the next 10 months. The program concludes with a month-long visit to their designated cities for the fellows in December. During this time, they will transition the application to be maintained by the municipality after CFA moves on to new cities at the start of the year.

CFA’s service experience might simply be better suited to Kellett’s skills and experience than TFA, as he is no stranger to web 2.0. In 2006, he founded Midd-Blog.com a community website for his college that has grown to be a hub for community discussion. He was also National Public Radio’s first-ever Social Media Desk intern last summer.

Kellett was drawn to what he called the program’s “web-first outlook” after being discouraged by other organizations’ reluctance to embrace web 2.0 as an essential tool for community problems.

CFA doesn’t just rely on the altruism of young people to attract applicants, though. Fellows will receive a stipend of $35,000 during the project, as well as health insurance, but the major benefit to applicants rests in networking and résumé-building for future career moves.

According to Pahlka, the organization received support from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Facebook and Twitter have guaranteed first-round interviews for all CFA fellows. Pahlka is working with other companies to form similar arrangements, and she added that fellows will also be able to connect with senior leaders during their projects and during their training which might help them advance their careers when December 2011 comes around.

Like its applicants, CFA is also planning for the future. CFA staffers are concentrating on making its first year a success so it can build in the model in the future, but they have long-term plans as well. Pahlka hopes CFA can “spread those applications to more cities, build more applications, and continue to recruit top-notch candidates.” For now, the organizations is focused on the municipal level, but she has had requests to expand the program model to other levels of government, public agencies, and even internationally.

CFA has finalized its cities for this year, but the organization will need a new batch of local governments for the 2012 program. Do you see a problem in your city that could be solved by a web-based solution? More cities – including yours – could become interested in bringing the web 2.0 to town. And come 2013, you may be running a CFA-designed app on your smartphone.

Andrew Bluebond is a staff writer for Campus Progress. He attends Claremont McKenna College.