What I’m about to say should not detract from that last sentence. For society to function properly, we must have a far more engaged electorate, and we must have some sense that our vote means something. In fact, we’ve seen that who’s in office — particularly forward-thinking mayors around the country — has a huge impact on the kind progress that Code for America promotes. But I can’t help looking at the incredibly low rates of voting and not feel that there’s something truly fundamentally askew here.

When I worked in the video game industry (from about 1995 to 2004), a colleague used to talk about the disproportionate attention the industry paid to graphics. Around the early 2000s, we had video games with amazing graphics that were starting to look photo-realistic, but then the players would open their mouths and their dialogue and the behavior was so awkward and unrealistic that it was jarring. The storytelling and AI capabilities of the developers fell far short of what they could do graphically, and my colleague described it like a bodybuilder who spent all of his time on one arm, resulting in a body with one giant, powerful limb and the rest skinny and weak. Applying resources unevenly to an inter-connected system leaves the whole system ineffective.

Sometimes I feel like our attempts at engaging citizens in government is a little like that oddly asymmetric bodybuilder. As a society, we spend a lot of time strongly encouraging citizens to vote; some of those messages are highly partisan (as in the staggering amount of money spent on political campaigns), while some are bipartisan and targeted at the general need for an engaged, informed electorate (Rock the Vote, for instance). And we spend a lot of time on understanding the impact of various politicians on legislative and policy outcomes. But we spend relatively little time on the rest of the body of government, so the overall experience disappoints. As I’ve said before, government is a vast ocean, and politics is the six inch layer on top. What’s under that is bureaucracy, and it’s the operating system of our country. We can’t keep fiddling with the interface (electing politicians) when the underlying code base is so bloated and slow. At the risk of being fined for massive metaphor overuse, you could also say that politics is the skin on the body. You can’t fix problems of internal medicine with creams and lotions. Okay, one more, if you’ll forgive me: we’re quibbling about where the car should go instead of realizing that we’re driving a gas guzzler and the tank is almost empty.

I’m obviously not saying that we’re so great at getting people to vote, but maybe one reason we’re not is that when we do succeed in that task, too often voters end up feeling that even if their candidate won, nothing really changed. Which makes them less excited about voting again. In the meantime, the bureaucracies that actually produce the results of government are not featured in television commercials, are not hotly debated by pundits, are not really exposed to citizens except when they stand in line at the planning department or try to ameliorate blight in their neighborhood. Our true citizen engagement capabilities are those weak limbs that mean that no matter how much we work out that one arm, it’s still not going to be able to do the lifting we need it to do. Let’s get make voting better, and let’s make government better.  Both.

Photo credit: Philip Kromer,  Some rights reserved 

My current obsession (other than reading the applications to our new CfA Accelerator) is figuring out how to paint this quote on the most visible wall in our office, 10 feet tall by six feet wide. Through someone’s tweet (wish I could remember whose), I landed on a 2007 essay by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, who has apparently used this quote often in his work. It was one of those moments that refresh your appreciation of metaphor, as it seemed to literally jump out at me, to almost physically capture me. It’s quite a line, and quite a piece of advice.

I wasn’t always this sentimental, proverb-happy, or optimistic. Blame the CfA fellows, and everyone who supports them, for turning me into a sap. I guess what I like about the quote (and like is a completely insufficient word here, of course) is that the Fellows are doing just that (and doing, as opposed to just thinking or talking, is a very important word here).

But we’re not living in the early days of a better nation, are we? Our country is more like Elvis shortly before he was found dead on his bathroom floor. Thomas Friedman called it as he sees it in his column in the New York Times this weekend, asking if America has “ gone from a democracy to a “vetocracy” — from a system designed to prevent anyone in government from amassing too much power to a system in which no one can aggregate enough power to make any important decisions at all?” He ends with the sobering note that if we can’t actually change institutional rules on major scale, “Then we will never be a great country again, no matter who is elected.”

I can’t bring myself to disagree with Friedman, or with any of the many other luminaries foretelling our doom as a nation. The picture is undoubtedly bleak. But if we’re coming to the end of something, we’re also by definition at the beginning of something else, and those who look for the clear line between the two will be disappointed. They’ll also miss the chance to shape what’s to come. The future won’t come in the form of proposals, suggestions, or political platforms. It will appear already functional, if marginalized. It will be actual and surprising, like Better Block’s pop up downtowns, the success of Kickstarter, or interfaces to government that are simple, beautiful and easy to use.

I can’t look at the hundreds of people applying to the Code for America Fellowship, the thousands lending hands through the Brigade, and the dozens of civic startups raising their hands for the Accelerator and not see some sort of beginning. We’re in the early days of something, that’s for sure.

The upside is there’s still some time to crowdsource some of the talk. What questions do you have for me? What would you like me to cover? I’m going to talk a little bit about why government works the way it does and what can be done about it, a bit about the market for government technology, and a lot about the role of citizenship in all this. I’m going to tell some stories from the first 1.2 years of Code for America. But what do YOU want to hear?

Leave your requests in comments here.

Listen to Jen’s keynote.

The prep was pretty intense. I started with a draft of the talk that I thought was pretty good, but three and four drafts later it was still, clearly, not good enough. Nine and ten drafts later, it still wasn’t there, and my ability to stay with it was wearing terribly thin. At one point I threw a spoon in frustration, but I’d be disingenuous if I implied that was the only sign of sort of falling apart. There were nights I couldn’t sleep thinking about standing there getting ready to go on stage and not being confident in what I was going to say. There were days I cursed the lovely June Cohen for asking me to do this. There was stress about what to wear, and enormous changes at the last minute.

There were also, thankfully, an enormous number of people who had my back. Christina Harbridge taught me to speak in my own voice and to trust myself, and without her I would have gone terribly astray. She and many others, including Tim O’Reilly, Abhi Nemani, Jack Madans, Lane Becker, Thor Mueller, June Cohen, David Feldman, and Gina Barnett heard drafts of the talk and provided valuable input. Abhi did my slides. June suggested that if I was going to wear black, I should also wear some “statement jewelry,” and not having anything good of my own, I sent a call to help to my girlfriends, who texted me pictures of big chunky necklaces and bracelets that might look good on stage. (I was adorned with a different fabulous necklace each day of the event, courtesy of Maxi Lilley and Anne Tway.) And as the hour of my talk approached, I received emails and texts from dozens and dozens of friends, supporters, donors, family, colleagues and ex-colleagues, wishing me good luck, most notably from the staff back at the office, who sent so much love and support I got all choked up. I strongly suspect they held an actual prayer session for me, masquerading as a staff meeting.

The talk just before mine was a romp through meta-layers of crowdsourcing; Lior Zoref crowdsourced his whole talk as an homage to crowdsourcing. He was also hysterically funny and brought an actual ox on stage, which, honestly, just isn’t fair, and provided me another “damn you, June Cohen” moment for making me follow him. But while I mentioned crowdsourcing only once, my talk was almost as crowdsourced as his. It’s not just all the feedback, support, and fashion help. Nigel Jacob and Chris Osgood in Boston’s Office of New Urban Mechanics let me lift their possum story practically verbatim from a presentation they did in New York, and provided the awesome Adopt-a-Hydrant posters. Scott Silverman (via Ryan Resella) provided the other possum story and they and all the other fellows, of course, provided the inspiration for the entire talk. The shadow of Tim O’Reilly’s famous brain can be seen clearly in the logic of the talk, and his heart in the values I tried to express. And the reason I got to stand on that stage in the first place is the amazing Lesa Mitchell, who I’m pretty sure was pitching me to the powers that be for quite some time. I am one lucky woman.

Speaking at TED is an amazing experience. The team appears to have practically unlimited resources, but it’s lovely to see how they use those resources to create a really superb experience for their speakers and attendees. The team takes great care to make sure the speakers understand their surroundings, are comfortable with the stage and backstage environments, and aren’t taken by surprise. (Ironically, I was one of the very few victims of “stage surprise,” walking out for my big moment and finding my slides forwarded to a random point in the middle of the deck, but mistakes do happen.) But overall the team displays an uncanny ability to anticipate needs and meet them before they’re even asked. After my talk, just as it was occurring to me that I’d love to see the video before it goes up online, I received an email from the TED team saying I could pick up a DVD of my (unedited) talk before I left. They don’t get everything right (see Diana Lind’s critique of their attempt to honor the idea of City 2.0). But having worked in the conference business for many years, speaking at TED was enlightening and something I wish I could have had the educational benefits of long ago.

Little things matter. The TED teams’ attention to detail reminded me of a moment from our CfA Institute this January, when the 2012 fellows were talking about their motivations and perspectives on government. Tamara Shopsin shared with the team a moment when she looked at government differently. She was in City Hall in New York, where hundreds of couples go to get married, and noticed a mirror around the corner from office of marriage licenses. Someone had thought to make it easy for brides and grooms to check how they looked just before they went before the justice of the peace. It was a tiny detail, but it said something to Tamara about how the humanness of this institution. Compare how the TED team focuses on experience to your average interaction with government, and there’s still a huge contrast. But the desire to serve the public is there, and we need to bring it out and support it.

Narrowing the gap between the best experiences we have as consumers and the experiences we have as citizens is part of the work we do at Code for America. To do that, we’re going to have to get people to believe government can be better. Chris Anderson of Wired told me afterwards that when I started my talk, he thought “oh no, she’s going to talk about government. Ugh.” But by the end, he’d changed his mind. I’m grateful to June and the rest of the team at TED for giving me the chance to change a few minds, to do something I was scared to do, and for providing an unparalleled experience, something to which we should all aspire.

And, no, the video isn’t up yet, but I’m sure Abhi will blog it when it is.

But what does this mean for Civic Commons? For the past year, we have incubated Civic Commons as a separate organization reporting to Code for America’s board, and during that time, the team has a number hypotheses about how best to promote open innovation in government. They have advanced open standards, helped open source civic technology, and promoted the reuse of those applications. Most recently, the Civic Commons team delivered an excellent product in the form of the Marketplace. This online directory of “what’s working, where” in civic technology has the potential to facilitate much faster innovation in this space. While the Marketplace is brand new and needs cultivation, community and support to thrive, we believe that it holds the promise of becoming a valuable and disruptive tool for governments.

With Nick’s transition, the Code for America board felt it best for the Civic Commons activities to officially become part of Code for America, and to focus the organization’s efforts on the Marketplace. For the time being, the project will move under Abhi Nemani, Code for America’s Director of Strategy and Communication, and he’s currently in the process of hiring a full-time community manager, charged with outreach to those who can help populate and benefit from the site, welcoming contributors and users, troubleshooting, and generally making this piece of the web into a real community. Alan Palazzolo, a 2011 CfA Fellow, is onboard as well to continue to work on the site, so that it can evolve to meet the needs of the users. One deliverable of this new team will be a product called the Engagement Commons, funded by the Knight Foundation, to take a close look at what tools are proving most useful for engaging citizens. The team will also begin convening the Steering Committee of city CIOs, with an eye towards better understanding the needs of cities, and finding new ways to serve their needs in the coming year.

Of course, the Marketplace and Engagement Commons are just pieces of the broader open innovation agenda. This means that for the other Civic Commons-related activities — including work on various standards and technical consulting to help government entities open source their software — we will turn to the already active, passionate community for leadership. Fortunately, the other Civic Commons team members are transitioning into roles well suited for just that. Philip Ashlock, Open311’s de facto community manager, will continue his active work on the increasingly important standard with OpenPlans. Karl Fogel, who masterfully coached teams through the open sourcing of both the Federal IT Dashboard and San Francisco’s Enterprise Addressing System, will move on work with the Open Internet Tools Project and expand his private consulting practice in open technology strategies. We are grateful to Phil and Karl — along with the entire OpenPlans team — for their contributions to Civic Commons and civic technology innovation generally.

As the Marketplace evolves, and as we learn more about the emerging space, we look forward to continuing to evolve Civic Commons, and we hope you will both help us and join us as we do.

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.