Bob Sofman, our new Program Director, who is responsible for the fellowship experience and outcomes, corralling the educational program, the processes and structures of the engagement with the fellows and the cities, and for supporting all the players in the fellowship.  Bob has had a diverse career – from counseling adolescents early in his career to holding executive positions in both large companies and startups. During the 10 years Bob spent at ATT, he held a variety of positions, including running ATT’s International Inbound business. From ATT, Bob helped launch PacBell’s Long Distance business and from there joined his first startup AVIRNEX in a CMO role. After a successful acquisition, Bob joined PointCast where he helped direct the sale of the company and then spent 7 years as an SVP at Charles Schwab where he launched Schwab’s wireless business and led the eBusiness Group. He holds a BS in Psychology and two Masters Degrees (Counseling and Computer Science), as well as being certified in change and culture management. Bob is a single father of a 6 year-old son, lives in San Francisco, and sits on several non-profit and advisory boards.

Sheila Bapat, who, as Donor Relations Manager, works with the many individuals and institutions who support our work.  Sheila has woven civic engagement and women’s political equality into her life and career ever since she served as a Kids Voting USA representative at the age of 15. More recently, she worked to launch The 2012 Project, a nonpartisan national campaign to encourage women in technology, science, and related fields to pursue public service. An attorney by training, Sheila practiced employment litigation briefly in San Francisco before entering the nonprofit sector. During law school at the University of Pennsylvania, Sheila served as president of the national board of Law Students for Reproductive Justice. She currently serves on the board of ACCESS Women’s Health Justice, an Oakland-based nonprofit that connects underserved women to reproductive health providers.

Michael Santus, our wonderful new Office Manager, joined Code for America just last month. Originally from Philadelphia, he moved west in 1995. He obtained extensive skills and experience in the financial planning industry, he has spent the past five+ years as the Sales Operations Manager for a local Bay Area classic and exotic car dealer. He is a Mercedes Benz lover and an avid traveler whose motto is “Have luggage will travel.”

If you follow our blog, you may already have met Jack Madans, who came to us as an intern, stayed on to coordinate our first Code for America Summit, and gave you popular blog posts such as What’s in Our Inboxes and the heartwarming In Our Own Words. Before coming to CfA, Jack cut his teeth as a community organizer early, founding FoodCycle and the Good Internet Conference, and then went on to intern at the White House, assisting with policy production in the the Office of Urban Affairs. Jack is now full-time with Code for America, supporting the development of the CfA Brigade and personally supporting me and the team by wrangling my schedule.

We’ve got a pretty crack team here, which is good since we’re swinging wide this year.  A belated public welcome to Michael, Sheila, Bob, and Jack!

How will we grow, and what does this mean for the future of the organization? Well, this year, we learned that the fellowship is a powerful tool for bringing innovation into government, so we’ll be expanding the program with more cities and more fellows. We also realize that the fellowship is just one tool to realize the change we seek, so next year we will be working from the outside as well, tapping into the energy in local community groups and leveraging the disruptive potential of entrepreneurs.

Evolving Fellowship: In 2012, we’ll put fellows in eight cities, a big jump from our pilot year. We’re also institutionalizing the experimental, test-driven culture that led to many of our successes this year and applying the lessons learned to make a better fellowship. We’re looking forward not only to great new apps and stories of innovation, but to reuse of the 2011 apps by our new city partners and others. We’d like to thank not only Google but also the John S and James L Knight Foundation, who has made the fellowship possible from the start and continues to fund the fellows program in 2012, as well as the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and many others who’ve made it possible for us to bring the program to new cities in 2012.

Applications for the 2013 Fellowship opened today; apply now: http://codeforamerica.org/apply

Civic Startup Seed Accelerator: Disruptive technology in the hands of entrepreneurs can change the world. It’s time it changed government. We’re launching a seed accelerator to foster sustainable businesses that can become the next generation of government vendors. We’re grateful also the Kauffman Foundation for supporting this program. Look for more information about the seed accelerator in Spring 2012. Stay connected by signing up here.

CfA Brigade: Thousands of citizens across the country want to “code for America” and bring the changes they see around them to their city. In 2012, we’ll roll out an online platform to connect civic hackers and others with each other locally, and to reuse and remix civic apps in their cities. Look for a chance to be a part of this movement starting in March, and in the meantime, sign up for access when the beta site goes live.

While the fellowship is pretty well defined, the two new programs are just starting to take shape. There’s a lot to do in terms of strategy, execution, funding, and outreach. We’d like these programs to reflect the desires and creativity of all of you who care about Code for America’s mission. We’re couldn’t be more excited (and perhaps a little daunted) about what’s ahead, and we hope you join us in these efforts in 2012.

Many thanks go to CfA’s communications team, including Abhi Nemani and Lauren Reid, for producing this document in-house in just a few weeks, along with help from Sheila Bapat and Christian Smith-Socaris, who support our development efforts. We hope you enjoy it!

If you have any trouble viewing it above, the 2011 Code for America Annual Report is available as a downloadable pdf in both print-friendly version and full spreads, licensed through Creative Commons.

2012 Cities

Austin	Chicago	Detroit	Honolulu
Macon	New Orleans	Philadelphia	Santa Cruz

Select a city seal to learn about its project for 2012.

Click through any headshot to meet each 2012 fellow. See all.

- Jennifer Pahlka, Founder, Code for America

I’m so happy, and proud, to celebrate our second birthday. The first two years have been amazing. Needless to say a lot has happened. So as our inaugural class of 19 fellows head toward graduation, and we embark on our third year, I thought I would share the story of how Code for America got started.

In 2008, I was working as the co-chair of the Web 2.0 Expo and a general manager of the Web 2.0 events brand for TechWeb. I worked closely with the conferences team at O’Reilly Media, with whom we co-produced these events. The Web 2.0 meme had really exploded, and the incredible growth in attendance spoke to how eager so many people were to harness participation and the other hallmarks of Web 2.0 to keep their businesses competitive. But there were little glimmers around the edges of our peripheral vision to suggest that it wasn’t just markets that could be disrupted by these principles. In anticipation of winning the election, Obama’s folks were tapping folks from Google and other technology platform companies to serve on the transition team. A few governments were starting to adopt social media. A small number of innovative developers were starting to scrape websites and make something out of government data.

At a Mashup Camp in Mountain View, Calif. in November 2008, Tim O’Reilly suggested to my then boss Eric Faurot that we add a track on government to the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo. Eric loved the idea but suggested that content should have its own event, located in Washington D.C. where government folks could reasonably be expected to attend. Thus, Gov 2.0 events brand, was born. However, the intellectual work that would go into defining this term, Gov 2.0, and the new avenues that it would reveal, had not yet begun in earnest.

I was privileged to be along for the ride as Tim undertook that mission. So many people immediately took Gov 2.0 to mean the use of social media in government, but Tim knew there was something more substantive that needed to be explored, extracted, and properly framed. He spoke with dozens and dozens of federal government officials and staff . He focused on this idea of government as a platform as a way of explaining the opportunity that seemed to be present to governments at this moment in time. This was really the first time in my life I’d really given much thought to government (as distinct from politics), and it struck me as something suddenly important and somehow urgent. I wanted to contribute to these new ideas in some way.

The Gov 2.0 brand and team were very much focused on the federal government, but it was Andrew Greenhill who redirected my attention to the local level. Andrew had the good fortune and good judgment (many years ago) to marry my best friend from childhood, Valerie, and our families have long been close. He heard about our work on Gov 2.0 and immediately understood it in the context of the challenges his city faced. It wasn’t theory or rhetoric — but real, urgent, and influenced people’s lives. Andrew set out to convince me that the real traction in this concept would be found not in D.C., but in the cities across the U.S. that were facing dramatic budget cutbacks and needed to learn how to scale-up civic participation in order to change the game.

Andrew wanted me to help him recruit developers to build apps for Tucson, Ariz., — apps that demonstrated that the City of Tucson, where he and Valerie lived, could be a platform for citizens to transform the city into what they wanted and needed it to be. For months, I repeatedly said that I thought it was a great idea, but had no idea how to make it happen.  Competent app developers tended to be quite busy with much more lucrative work than coding for a budget-crunched city.

In July 2009, I was at a family reunion in Flagstaff, Ariz., and Valerie and Andrew came up from Tucson to visit. Over beers on the deck of the condo my grandmother had rented for us (thank you, Grandma!), we talked about Andrew’s ideas, and compared notes on what I was learning as part of the team working on the Gov 2.0 events, the first of which was slated for that fall. The conversation shifted to Andrew’s years as a corps member in one of the first classes of Teach for America. A light bulb went off in my head. No Web 2.0 developer was going to write apps for government for the money, but they might do it for a little bit of glory, for the chance to serve their country, and to feel good about giving back. There could be a Teach for America for the current generation of creative geeks who would otherwise take jobs at Facebook or Google.

Maybe I’m remembering it with more drama than it really had, but I recall a bit of an “aha moment.” To my delight, Valerie and Andrew both seemed to think this was actually a good idea, and I really took notice when my friend (and ex-husband) Chris Hecker, who was also there and who is famously critical (in the best sense of the word), chimed in with an unqualified “that could work.” Chris holds most things in the world to a very high standard, so it meant something that he was so supportive, and he remains so today.

That night at dinner I told my dad and stepmother that I was going to quit my job and start a non-profit. It seemed rather abrupt to say the least. But I was resolved from that afternoon on. I also sent an email to Tim and Gina Blaber, the VP of conferences at O’Reilly, about my idea, and Tim responded immediately with a lot of interest. We agreed to talk when I was back from vacation.

That was the end of July, 2009. A few weeks later in mid August was Transparency Camp West, hosted by the Sunlight Foundation, whom we’d been tracking (and admiring) through our Gov 2.0 work. Having been totally wowed by the first Transparency Camp in D.C. several months earlier, and knowing the attendees would be an amazing group of people, I resolved to go down and test my idea with a few folks.

Over the preceeding few weeks, I’d been meaning to contact Leonard Lin, someone I’d worked with on the previous Web 2.0 Expo and whom I knew was looking for ways to do good through technology; he’d helped scrape websites for names of Katrina victims in order to help reconnect them with family, ran Yahoo’s Hack Day program, and generally been at work making good in the world. I took it as a sign that as I walked up to the seating area for Transparency Camp, Leonard was the first person I saw.

I sat down at a crowded table with Leonard and told him my idea, and what followed still amazes me. Clay Johnson, then the director of Sunlight Labs, a fantastic developer and change agent, overheard my pitch and came over. He pointed at me across the table as if to accuse me of a crime (Clay is pretty dramatic) and said in his booming, authoritative voice, “We’ll fund you for that.” Just like that. It didn’t happen as quickly as Clay’s declaration made it sound it would, but not only did Sunlight provide seed funding for the organization, but also served as our fiscal sponsor while we applied for 501(c)3 status, which allowed us to get off the ground about a year before we would have otherwise. I’m forever grateful to Clay and to Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s inspiring executive director, for what they did for Code for America. And it wasn’t just the funding and sponsorship, it was the legitimacy we got from people seeing that Clay and Ellen believed in us. I’m not sure anyone would have taken the idea seriously if they had not stepped up.

But back to the lunch table at Transparency Camp, Clay’s support was not the only win for Code for America that day. Leonard agreed to help get the organization off the ground, and within a few weeks had done our wonderful logo, put up a website, and started researching technology platforms within cities. Also sitting at the table that day were Jay Nath and Kelly Pretzer from the City and County of San Francisco and Kelly Moriaru, who was then with the City of Palo Alto. Leonard or Clay (or someone) else called the three city people over to hear my pitch, and all of them were enthusiastic about the ideas. Kelly Moriaru went on to serve on our city steering committee, and Jay has stayed very active with Code for America while making his own waves within the City of San Francisco.

Along the way I had recruited Andrew, Leonard, and Tim all to serve on Code for America’s board of directors, but we needed someone else, someone to help guide our messaging and communications. I took the opportunity to reach out to Monica Harrington, whom I’ve admired as a strategic marketer and executive since I met her when we were both in the video game industry.  Monica held a number of senior positions at Microsoft before leaving to help run Valve Software with her husband, Mike, and I’d always wanted to find an excuse to enroll her as a mentor. Luckily for Code for America, Monica agreed to join the board and had a huge impact on how we positioned and presented our nascent program. I’m so grateful for all that she’s done for us.

With a board in place and some seed funding from Sunlight, I took the plunge and gave notice at my job. It was quite a lot of notice, because we were still a few months out from Web 2.0 Expo New York, and I didn’t feel right about leaving before the event. Frankly, I should have been more scared than I was. I certainly knew this new organization might not work, but I had no real reservations about giving it a shot, largely because of all the people who encouraged me.

One person whose encouragement made a big difference was Jean Case of the Case Foundation.  I was lucky to get a meeting with her while in D.C. after the first Gov 2.0 Summit, and pitched her the idea. She was so excited she jumped up out of her chair and exclaimed something like “Oh, I love it!” She kicked in another $10,000 in seed funding for the organization, but I’m as grateful for her unabashed enthusiasm as for the funding. Jean’s thinking on topics like government reform and sustainability for non-profits continues to inspire me. I’m hugely grateful for her support, and for Michael Smith’s support as well. Michael is a caring, warm program officer at Case and has continued to connect and promote the organization since the grant.

Sunlight and Case provided seed funding to get the organization started, but these amounts were not the kind you can pay salaries on (even one salary). In order to hire real staff, I had to find more foundations with programs that fit with Code for America’s mission. I was lucky to find those foundations, or more accurately, to find three wonderful people at those foundations: Benjamin de la Pena at Rockefeller, Stacy Donohue at Omidyar Network, and Damian Thorman at the Knight Foundation. The stories of each of these relationships, and the warmth, kindness, and generosity of each of these individuals, is central to Code for America’s story —  but now I’m straying from my original focus on how the organization first got started. I can’t tell that story without thanking Ben, Stacy and Damian, however. We would not have had a first year without them.

There are so many other people who helped get the organization off the ground. I can’t possibly mention them all here, but have to give a shout out to Jack Dangermond, Adam Abrons (who hid a $10,000 donation from his family foundation in a birthday gift to me…pretty awesome), Paul Maritz, Shel Kaphan, Vonceil and Scott Yara, Chris DiBona, Ron Bouganim, and Wendy Owen. Most importantly, though, there are four people who all took major risks, leaving stable jobs and amazing opportunities, to work for a nascent, chaotic, demanding startup. I know that each of them made this possibly crazy leap because they believe in what Code for America can do, and that is truly priceless. Those four people are Meghan Reilly, Abhi Nemani, Dan Melton, and Alissa Black.  When they joined – all around the same time in the summer of 2010 — is when Code for America really began.

• Ben Berkowitz, SeeClickFix
• Bryce Roberts, OATV
• Carl Tashian, OurGoods
• Danese Cooper, Wikimedia
• Denise Gershbein, Frog
• DJ Patil, Greylock
• Emily Chang, IdeaCodes
• Heather Champ, Fertile Medium
• Hilary Hoeber, Ideo
• Jay Nath, City of San Francisco
• Joe Edelman, Groundcrew
• John Lilly, Greylock
• Manish Shah, Rap Leaf
• Michal Migurski, Stamen Design
• Parker Thompson, Pivotal Labs
• Steven Spiker, Urban Strategies Council
• Stewart Brand, The Long Now Foundation
• Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media
• Tom Preston-Werner, Github

In addition, a truly huge shout out to Wendy Owen and Ron Bouganim for mentoring the Pheattle and Boston teams, respectively. To all our mentors, thank you!

Please make a better Freecycle.

Earlier this year when Code for America was closed for a break, and I spent some of the time off cleaning out my basement. When I moved into my house ten years ago, the previous owners (who must have been really into refinishing wood furniture) failed to clean out the basement when they moved, leaving shelves full of the kinds of things people have in basements: motor oil, paint, caulk, scrap wood, every kind of paint stripper and solvent on the market, and, oddly, bottles and bottles of linseed oil. These days, with a full time startup and a kid, I’m not changing my own oil, refinishing my own furniture, or caulking my own bathtub. It was time for this stuff to go.

You can’t throw toxic waste into the garbage. Either you drive it down to the Household Hazardous Waste Facility, which is open three days a week for just three hours each day, or, if it’s remotely usable, you can try to give it to someone else who could use it. A surprising amount of the stuff in my basement was full, unopened bottles of items you’d pay good money for at the store, so I decided to try to give some of it away. Benefit to neighbor + decreased burden on waste facility + less toxic waste in the environment = win win win, right?

Except wow, have you ever used freecycle? The communication overhead is kind of a beast. After you post your item on offer, it goes out in a daily email, and folks start responding. Say you choose the first person who responds, and attempt to set up a time to do the hand off. In the meantime you have another dozen inquiries coming in, each of whom need to be told they are next in line. Typically, it takes a few days to discover that the first person isn’t in fact going to come by when he said he would, and it’s time to offer the item to another responder. Then there’s that whole communication, agreeing upon a time, sending the address and instructions, etc. When the item is finally, gleefully, out of your possession, there is still informing the remaining respondents and marking the item as taken on the freecycle website. That’s a lot of email to get rid of one bag of motor oil. The net result is that you feel like you’ve tried to do the right thing, and ended up punished for it. All this back and forth is more than the average busy person really wants to take on.

And it’s not hard to imagine a far more efficient system, one that borrows a little bit from Ebay, a little bit from Google Calendar, and a little bit from NeighborGoods. A decent system should structure the interactions and provide transparency into the process. Instead of emailing someone with your interest, it should look more like a bid on Ebay, and it should allow you to see how many others are interested in the item. Instead of a price, the system should ask takers to indicate when they could come by to pick the item up, or allow the giver/donor to offer up times convenient for them for the handoff, and let takers commit to those times in their “bid.” A giver could choose a first place “bid” and automatically generate an email to the taker with the appropriate information, including the address and boilerplate language around their commitment to claim the item at the agreed upon time. If the item isn’t taken by the agreed upon time, the giver would simply need to tell the system to move on to the next appropriate bid and automatically send the information again, until the item is actually gone and the giver notes this. Then the system could inform all the interested parties that the item is no longer available. A properly constructed system would handle the communication overhead for both parties, and make it a whole lot easier to give away stuff you don’t need.

Who cares about a system like this working? Or rather, who should care? Well, besides Mother Earth, who always appreciates less landfill, your municipal waste management authority should care, which means your city or county government should care when they are trying to balance their budgets every year. Every item diverted from the dump or the toxic waste facility is a few dollars saved to the bottom line. What if, when you went online to look up the hours of the household hazardous waste facility, or called their hotline, you were encouraged to try giving your items away first, through an online network? If a system like that reduced demand on the municipal waste system by even just two or three percent, how much money would your city or county save? What if hundreds of cities and counties saved just a few percent this way? Would it be worth it?

As we are nearing the end of Code for America’s inaugural fellowship year, we’re excited to announce the forward-thinking city governments we will be partnering with in 2012. Today we’re honored to share that the cities of Detroit, Macon and Philadelphia have been selected as partners for the Code for America program next year.

At the core of Code for America is a belief that we live in an age of participation, but that our public institutions haven’t benefited equally from the technologies and approaches that have so dramatically changed the business and social landscape in the past decade. We are blessed to have the support of an institution that also believes fundamentally in the power of civic engagement to create a better world. The John S and James L Knight Foundation is supporting Code for America’s engagements in these three cities.

The Knight Foundation’s funding allows Code for America to recruit a team of three talented developers, designers, and product managers for each of the three cities. These talented and passionate individuals are giving a year of service to the cause of more open, participatory and efficient city government.  They will work with officials in City Hall and local civic groups to brainstorm and implement innovative applications to engage citizens in solving a particular problem in these cities. This is what we call “a new kind of public service,” one in which citizens use their skills hands-on to make a difference.

While six to eight cities will be chosen for the 2012 program, Detroit, Macon, and Philadelphia were some of the first cities selected because of their proposed project, community support and the opportunity for impact. In each city, we will be leveraging technology to boost citizen participation, thanks to the support of Knight Foundation’s Technology for Engagement Initiative, which funds projects that help communities use technology for civic engagement.

While each city’s projects will be defined by the fellows’ research on the ground, we have identified the core problem area that they’ll be tackling:

• Detroit: Data on the vacant properties in Detroit is currently currently hard to access and unorganized, so the city lacks a clear picture on available real estate. This undercuts future residential and commercial development. The Code for America project will build software to engage the community to address urban blight: http://codeforamerica.org/detroit201
• Philadelphia: In 2011, the CfA fellows are bringing the civic engagement platform, Change by Us, to Philadelphia, which enables local leaders to solve local problems, in addition to building multiple other apps apps for Philadelphia, such as tools to explore public art, track city council meetings, find community groups and understand the impact of transportation choices. In 2012, they will build on-top of the Change by Us platform, not only spreading its use across the city, but also developing new features to increase its effectiveness: http://codeforamerica.org/philadelphia2012
• Macon: Over the past few years, there has been tremendous advancements in the tools cities have to enhance civic life in their communities, ranging from mobile communication technologies to group coordination platforms. The CfA fellows will bring the latest tools to Macon to stimulate resident participation: http://codeforamerica.org/macon2012

Each project is both promising and challenging, but we’re confident the 2012 Code for America fellows who will work with these cities will be up to the challenge.  We received over 550 applications for next year’s fellowship class, and are in the process of a competitive selection process, choosing from amongst an incredibly impressive candidate pool. We’re excited to see what they accomplish, so stay tuned and join us in finding out.

With that understanding in mind, they started experimenting, trying out different things, prototyping solutions, and testing them with users. Things like Q/A sites or social toolkits; marketing platforms and online calendars. Based on all the feedback, they came to the conclusion that the core need was for tools to help civic leaders draw attention to their projects and also work with each other to pool resources.

Enter Change by Us. Created by New York-based media design firm Local Projects and national urban advocacy non-profit CEOs for Cities, Change by Us is a tool that enables citizens to connect with their local governments and each other to share ideas and collaborate on projects for city improvement. Change By Us launched in New York City in July and was made possible with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Technology for Engagement Initiative and The Rockefeller Foundation.

In New York, it is currently being used to find out ways to make the city more environmentally friendly: citizens are asked to text in their ideas, and then they are grouped with others with similar interests and can organize to make something happen. We saw great potential in Change by Us as the platform for us to serve the needs of civic leaders in our cities — and in others across the country. Especially when reuse and collaboration are core to our model, and how we think governments themselves need to be operating in the 21st century.

So today, we’re pleased to announce that we’re partnering with Local Projects and CEOs for Cities to launch Change By Us in Philadelphia and Seattle and make it publicly available for any other city interested in deploying it. This partnership allows the Code for America teams to leverage the Change By Us platform in our cities, and to enhance it, based on user research, by adding features to connect the projects to social media and makes it easy for neighbors to share skills, time and resources.

We’re also excited about bringing this platform into the Commons. Mjumbe Poe, Aaron Ogle, Tyler Stalder, and several other fellows on the Philadelphia and Seattle teams have already been going through the platform, generalizing the code, and documenting the software, so that any city could deploy it, or any developer could help make it even better. Over the next few months they’ll continue that work in conjunction with the Local Projects teams, including relicensing the code. When they’re done in October, the Change by Us platform will be available for implementation or customization by other government users and developers. We’re proud to help spread an important tool for civic participation, along with CEOs for Cities and Local Projects who will also continue their work, rolling out the platform in cities across the country.

This partnership has really just begun, and we’re excited to see unfold. We’re thrilled to be working with CEOs for Cities and Local Projects — friends of ours in more ways than one. We’re confident that together, we’ll develop a better product and make a bigger impact.

Check back for frequent updates on where we are and where we’re heading.

The public relations firm Edelman’s yearly global study on the public’s confidence in institutions shows that while last year, everyone was outraged at corporations, this year, we’re mad as hell at government. In the US, it seems the debt ceiling drama in particular has not exactly endeared our politicians to us. Elsewhere, it’s high speed rail crashes and more debt crises. (The difference between politics and government is glossed over here, and the subject of a later post. But to understand how people react to this decline in confidence, Freeland looks to the economist Albert O. Hirschman.

In 1970, while at Harvard, Mr. Hirschman wrote an influential meditation on how people respond to the decline of firms, organizations and states. He concluded that there are two options: exit — stop shopping at the store, quit your job, leave your country; and voice — speak to the manager, complain to your boss, or join the political opposition.

Exit or Voice. Coke or Pepsi. Those are your choices. You have to know where I’m going with this. If you know anything at all about Code for America, you must get that the whole reason this movement exists is that there is a generation (roughly speaking, maybe more just a group of people) for whom those are not the choices. I don’t think the Code for America fellows and the hundreds of others who work so hard to improve government from the outside really thought about Exit or Voice, considered them, and then rejected them or rebelled against them. I think they just grew up tinkering, making, fixing and hacking, and when they came of the age to consider the system that would take a third of their earnings for the rest of their lives, they proceeded to start tinkering, making, fixing and hacking it. A perfectly natural response.

Freeland points out that Exit is also a perfectly natural response, given the origins of our nation.

Mr. Hirschman came up with his theory of exit and voice in the United States, and he believed that exit had been accorded “an extraordinarily privileged position in the American political tradition.” That was partly because the United States was populated by exiters and their descendants — immigrants who chose to leave home rather than reform it — and partly because for much of American history the frontier made it possible to choose exit without even leaving the country.

I would argue that in the past twenty years, a solid chunk of American society has subscribed to the notion that the Internet was the new frontier, and a limitless one at that, and so the disgruntled could simply draw their own map, create their own circles, and be done with it. And it’s the Millennials who have brought us back down to earth and reminded us that the lesson of the Internet is that shared endeavor has value, that pooling resources is a good idea, and that government is the way we do things together that we can’t do individually. Which is why Millennials are the most pro-government generation in decades, however disgusted they would be by the debt ceiling brinksmanship, if they looked up from their laptops and smart phones long enough to notice. They are tapping into another innately American tradition, one of fundamental optimism, invention, and practicality. They’ve never met a system they couldn’t participate in, hack, mash-up, add value to or improve. And government is already meeting their expectations, providing data, enabling the creation of apps, and slowly adopting the tools of the Internet to make it easier for us to do the important work of governing ourselves together.

As much as I enjoyed this article, I’ll take issue with Freeman’s final point as well. She ends the piece: “It is no wonder so many of us distrust our governments. But in this age of exit, do we have much chance of reforming them?” But just prior, she argues that “competing, private-sector-operated alternatives to the public sector” only weaken our public institutions. She looks at it through Hirschman’s lens. I look at it through the lens of the hundreds of entrepreneurs, hackers, open government advocates and civic leaders I’ve met in the past three years who are changing the landscape of government. Yes, casual carpooling or even startups like Uber can threaten revenue to public transit, and as Clay Shirky described in Cognitive Surplus, governments can fight back by asserting their monopolies. But this shuts down much-needed innovation, and it’s shortsighted. (It’s also probably futile). This movement will need to work from the top down and the bottom up, and it will need to work from the inside and the outside. You could see Kickstarter as a private alternative to grants for the arts, Freecycle as competition for the municipal dump, or even TurboTax as shaming the IRS for their practically unusable interface. These businesses think outside the box in ways that government is generally precluded from, and they point the way to a civil society that actually works. That’s how you create confidence in government.

Exit, Voice, or neither: Make. Here’s a different choice, as expressed in Obama’s inauguration speech.

…It has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things, some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path toward prosperity and freedom.

If the men and women working to reform government or just build a better society are “obscure in their labor,” that’s fine by me. Let’s not distract them from their important work.