My first conversation with Jen was at a coffee shop in Hayes Valley in February 2010. She told me about her crazy notion that there were talented technologists that needed an avenue into public service. She went onto explain that those talented techies would introduce new models within local governments to make change possible. I immediately knew that I had to be a part of whatever Jen created. The organization’s success started with a passionate founder, but has grown exponentially because the Code for America staff are some of the most talented, driven, and creative people around. Honestly, I probably could have done most of my job from my home office but I chose to come into the Code for America office everyday because the people I worked with, fellows included, were incredibly engaging and made me better at my job.

I’ve recently come to regard Code for America as a trim tab. The trim tab is a tiny tab at the edge of a rudder that when moved has the ability to turn a whole ship around, and that’s exactly what Code for America is doing to local government. Code for America’s fellowship program impacts just a small portion of the larger machine (government), but Code for America is the trim tab that is changing the direction of the whole ship. I am proud to have been a part of that and will always remain close to their work.

While at Code for America I found myself telling people I was a “govie” at heart, but Code for America is not just about local governments. It’s also about the fellows that dedicate a year of their lives to public service. As much as I will miss being a part of Code for America’s work, mostly, I will miss the absolutely amazing people that show up everyday to make change. My personal growth has come from the wonderful relationships I share with our fellows and the inspiring, creative work they do everyday.

I will bring the Code for America passion, ingenuity, and opportunity with me to the New America Foundation and continue creating more trim tabs in the civic space.

Therefore, it’s no surprise the Federal government is asking for help to determine the best practices and metrics for public participation. On December 6 they began seeking input on the best practices and metrics for public participation as part of their larger US National Open Government Action Plan. We have been similarly challenged at Code for America in our public participation projects. We’ve found that collaboration, participation, and engagement can mean very different things to different groups of people and governments. In our projects we’ve tried to think of participation in its broadest sense, and build online tools that make participation easy, social, and widespread.

In our search to answer these tough questions Civic Commons has pulled together a number of online resources that can help frame best practices for civic engagement. The wiki has helpful information and examples of participation, transparency, open data, and open source in action.

Another helpful resource designed for local officials is Planning for Stronger Local Democracy: A Field Guide for Local Officials. The field guide is a toolkit designed to assist officials in strengthening local democracy by cultivating transparency and inclusivity with citizens.

I encourage you to participate and contribute your thoughts to the White House to help shape the way our government thinks about and measures participation. It’s not an easy task and they shouldn’t be doing it alone. Share your input by January 3, 2012.

The day was half unconference and half panels and facilitated exercises. I really enjoyed the facilitated exercise Burt led during the last portion of the day. He presented design thinking methodology, showed a short video of NYU students practicing design thinking in the classroom, and then broke up the audience into eight groups where we were tasked with applying design thinking to a problem such as providing residents with real-time bus schedules or engaging the public in the city budgeting process. Each group had to think through the challenge and then quickly prototype a solution and present it back to the entire camp.

While the design exercise was the highlight for me, there were really vibrant discussions in each of the break-out sessions and commitments to continue the conversations and take action. Notes from each breakout session will be posted soon so be sure to check out the CityCampHNL site for more details on each session.

At the end of the event Doug Chin, Honolulu’s managing director, asked me what I thought they did well and what they could have done better.  What they did right was really show the participants that the city is listening to the community and is serious about citizen participation and engagement. The mayor made an appearance and more than 30 city employees from various departments including Human Resources, Customer Services, and Information Technology attended.

Because the participants were so engaged and active the only change I think they could make for CityCamp Honolulu 2012 is to extend it to two full days and allow for workshops to draft policy initiatives or outline datasets they’d like to have available in easily downloadable formats.

I can’t wait for our 2012 fellows to begin working with the City and County of Honolulu and the residents of the city — there’s so much passion there.

For more information about CityCampHNL check out this article by Jason Hibbets, a major supporter of CityCamp and guest panelist from Red Hat, the CityCampHNL website or join the Google Group. They will be posting notes from the event and hosting monthly meetups to follow through on action plans discussed during CityCamp Hololulu.

A few months ago Bonnie from iStrategy Labs invited me to speak at PICNIC, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but I was excited. It would be my first time attending the festival, and my first time in Amsterdam. I’d heard rave reviews from former festival-goers — it was the most exciting conference they’d ever gone to — so I knew I would be in for a treat.

My introduction to the festival-goers began in the shuttle ride from Schiphol to the hotel where we all would be staying. On my shuttle was Jeff Hull, a situational designer and Creative Director at Nonchalance, and Aaron Wolf Baum, a physicist growing algae for NASA. Off-hand it didn’t seem like there would be much overlap between our work worlds, but when I attended their panels I realized that we all held the mutual goal of solving the long-term problems that plague our planet. Though the methods we choose to go about it, and the nuances we focus our efforts on vary drastically the end result remains the same: do important work.

Jeff Hull’s panel, We Tell Stories By Any Means Necessary, discussed aspects of storytelling through individual’s interactions with cities and city governments. This, of course, falls right in-line with the we’re doing at Code for America.

On Jeff’s panel was Euro Beinat, a professor of location and context awareness, who presented real-time data visualizations of people interacting with their cities via tweets, Facebook updates, and transit rides.

Euro believes the challenge cities have utilizing data is due to the cities lack of a value system. Without an established value system, cities aren’t able to respond or process the new information. We’re seeing this on a wide-scale as cities attempt to make outdated data-driven decisions instead of prioritizing the practical usage of new data for citizen benefit.

How then do we revamp value systems for our cities? Enter storytelling. Euro argues that value systems are created through emotional responses and we must tell our stories to create emotional responses to the new information. I love this!

The work of the other panelists like Jeff and Lucy Walker, is exactly what we need to tell the stories that create and sustain up-to-date value systems for our cities.

Redesigning the Biology of Cities was a panel facilitated by Aaron Wolf Baum about the use of polyculture, algae, and other biology to make our cities sustainable. Aaron’s working with NASA in an attempt figure out how in 30 plus years from now, when we (hopefully) aren’t as reliant on fossil fuels, to use algae as jet fuel. I was impressed by Aaron’s work, not only because it has the potential to positively impact our environment, but because it’s a forward-thinking plan with a trajectory beyond 2040.

The panel I spoke on, Community Outsourcing, was a conversation about how to empower and engage residents in their communities; in turn making our communities better. We invited the audience to participate in our panel, and were joined by Kim Li Ti Oeij, who’s created an online site for addicts and homeless to access services in Amsterdam. Kim is an example of community outsourcing at its best. He takes information from various government sites and puts it in one place for easy and comprehensive access. Later we were joined by Frank Kresin who added that to be successful with community outsourcing we need to stay local, at the city level.

Some of the words that were repeated throughout the festival that I think are worth remembering: Action, Make, Now, Generation, Open, Storytelling, and Experiment.

Check out PICNIC 2011 photos on flickr. All photos in this blog provided by PICNIC Network.

City applicants were asked to identify problems in their city that our team of geeks could solve using light weight creative technology. As you can imagine, the problems were compelling and in most cases common among multiple cities. For example, in Detroit data on vacant properties is currently silo’ed and unorganized, so the city lacks a clear picture of available real estate, which undercuts future residential and commercial development. A number of other city applicants are interested in implementing Open311 in their cities and evolving customer service to include residents as resources in addressing their local issues. During the past four months Code for America staff, fellows and an amazing selection committee reviewed, rated, and evaluated the applications and narrowed down potential partners to a group of 10 finalists.

We’re pleased today to announce the list of finalists, and share details about their proposed projects. Please follow the links below to learn more about what each city is hoping to accomplish in CfA 2012:

2012 City Finalist Projects

Austin	Chicago	Detroit	Honolulu	Macon
New Orleans	New York	Philadelphia	Raleigh	Santa Cruz

This group will be narrowed down to five to eight city partners for our 2012 program. Final selections will be made based on the strength of leadership that can maneuver through or overcome bureaucratic obstacles, the availability of funding to support the project, and the ability for the solution to make an impact locally and to be shared nationally. We’ll be announcing selected cities later this year.

2012 Program Selection Committee

• Susan Christopherson – NAGW and County of Boulder
• Carol Coletta – CEOs for Cities
• Kevin Curry – City Camp
• Andrew Greenhill – City of Tucson
• Nigel Jacob – City of Boston
• Clay Johnson – Big Windows Lab
• Daniel X O’Neil – EveryBlock
• Tim O’Reilly – Board of Directors

We’re honored to have such a diverse and knowledgeable group of individuals helping us choose our partners for 2012.

As the applications to our 2012 program rolled in last month I couldn’t help feeling a little nostalgic about our 2011 applicant cities. It was February 2010 when I began volunteering for Code for America and my first assignment was to gather additional information from the cities to aid the final selection process. This month, one year later, once again I have the pleasure of working with 19 forward-thinking governments to explore further the problem areas they identified in their applications to our 2012 program.

The US Dept of State and 18 other governments applied for our 2012 program. To us, this signals a change in the way government is approaching problem-solving and is a clear demonstration that the old approaches are not acceptable anymore, that they need a new kind of solution.

In their application, Memphis stated that they have an “unrivaled appetite for change and for connection.” New York City’s Department of Education caught our attention by telling us they “are eager to share and spread innovative technologies with others in order to empower and improve student outcomes.” New Orleans wants to partner with Code for America to develop a creative solution to fight blight in their city; as stated in their application, they have a “citizenry that is savvy and engaged, having risen up to the challenge of rebuilding after Katrina.”

Detroit also faces significant challenges and feels that “there is an historic alignment between the citizens’ mandate for a more responsive and responsible City government and an Administration that is willing to address the root causes of these problems in partnership with the private, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors. Having a partner like Code for America, whose mission clearly aligns with Detroit’s efforts to tackle core problems with creativity and innovation, will only further strengthen the City’s efforts.”

We were thrilled to see Philadelphia, a current Code for America partner city, apply to participate in our program for another year! Philadelphia would like “to further enhance our forthcoming 2011 CFA platform. We envision our 2012 program involving a series of applications built on the CfA platform created through this year’s project.” Philadelphia has been an amazing partner, and it’s great to see that not only are they interested in working together again, they recognize the opportunity for government to work as a platform.

Full List of Governments Applying for the CfA 2012 Program:

• Anchorage, Alaska
• Austin, Texas
• Balboa Park – San Diego, California
• California Department of Economic Development
• California Department of Energy
• Columbus, Ohio
• Detroit, Michigan
• Hartford County, Maryland
• Memphis, Tennessee
• New Orleans, Louisiana
• New York City
• Omaha, Nebraska
• Palm Bay, Florida
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Raleigh, North Carolina
• San Francisco, California
• Santa Clarita, California
• Santa Cruz, California
• US Department of State

While the program is structured primarily around cities, we were so encouraged by the enthusiasm from all levels of government, that we opened the application up to any government interested. The challenges facing these governments are not unique. I’ve spoken to over 100 cities, counties and state agencies and they all are struggling to provide services, stimulate their local economies, create economic development opportunities, and improve the quality of life for their residents. Our 2012 program will tackle some of these core problems facing our communities with creative light-weight technology that will be shared with every level of government — every city, every county and every state — across the country.

We’ll be reviewing applications over the next two months with Code for America staff, current fellows, and a Selection Committee made up of members such as Tim O’Reily, Carol Coletta, Clay Johnson, Andrew Greenhill, and other civic and industry leaders. In June we’ll announce our final selection of the 2012 Program partners.

Bill Oates talked about his interest in our program and how Code for America’s different approach to solving problems aligned very well with how his team and the city likes to work. We asked Bill about his justification for funding our program and he said, “when we looked at the totality of the program, it was very clear to me that this investment the city was making… there was no question that this was going to be a great value for the city.”

We also had great questions from the participants about the participation fee, consideration of county or other levels of government partners, and how cities plan to maintain and grow our solutions after the fellowship year.

For those of you who were not able to participate we’ve posted a video of the presentation and a slide deck, both are available below.

The event is around the corner; register now to attend:
http://c4a.me/city-web-reg

A New Kind of Solution Webinar:
Why Your City Should Code for America

We invite you to join us for A New Kind of Solution: Why Your City Should Code for America webinar on Tuesday, February 8, 2011, at 10am PT. In a brief webinar, we will go over the city program, discuss some common challenges facing our local governments, and answer questions from the audience. This is your opportunity to learn about the state of local governments across the country and how Code for America can work with your city to solve core problems.

• What: Code for America City Program Webinar
• When: Tuesday, February 8, 2011, at 10am PT
• How: Online Event, Free Registration
• Register Now

Note: The webinar is being generously hosted by O’Reilly Media, and registration is being handled through their platform.

We’ve heard you loud and clear, and so have government employees in Baltimore, New York City, Chandler, Detroit, Memphis, and many other cities that have contacted me because you brought Code for America to their attention.

This is powerful stuff! Let’s boost the momentum and sprint over the next three weeks to double the number of cities on our map (yes we want 120!). If your city is already on the map, make it the leader in tweets. To date, New York City is in the lead with 6 tweets, followed by San Francisco, Lexington, Atlanta and Detroit with 4 tweets each.

I want to hear from government officials in your city! Go to our Citizen Action Center and take action to bring Code for America to your city in 2012. If you want more information about the program, be sure to attend our upcoming webinar on February 8. City Application deadline is March 1, 2011 so let’s hustle and spread the word quickly.