“The key lesson embedded in these seemingly paradoxical results is that people would rather improve government performance than reduce its size. They are extremely receptive to a reform agenda that would eliminate inefficient government programs, implement performance-based policy decisions, and adopt modern management methods and information technologies.” (emphasis mine)

This generation wants to keep government at the table, but seated in a desk chair, not a recliner.

This is why I think there’s been such great response to the CfA Fellowship from Millennials. It comes at a time when government needs to change and people believe they can make that happen. It’s a perfect storm. We can catalyze increased volunteerism, modern efficiencies, and renewed confidence, all by connecting the dots between the Millennials’ desire for service and change and politicians’ interest in better government and, well, self-preservation. As the CAP report puts it, Millennials “hold the key to a new era of public confidence in government—if public officials learn to spend taxpayers’ dollars more carefully, and do what works.” In fact, a majority (67%) across generations shared this sentiment. And so in a way, CfA can offer any city the chance to “ask not,” and provide any citizen — young and old — an answer.

The cities chosen for the first Code for America cycle are:

• Boston, MA
• Boulder, CO
• District of Columbia
• Philadelphia, PA
• Seattle, WA

Part of the promise of CfA is to bring the best thinking from the web industry together with the best thinking from cities, and as part of that agenda we will be planning brainstorm days with each city over the next two months.  We will invite web industry innovators and thought leaders to meet with the key stakeholders inside city hall and further develop the opportunities inherent in the projects they’ve proposed.

Currently, Boston is committed to experimenting with a number of web applications to demonstrate that government can be agile and nimble, but also as a means to ensure users adoption of the application. The team of Fellows assigned to the Boston project will be structured as a mini start-up, where they will be responsible for designing the applications, managing the development process, working with all stakeholders, and eventually marketing it to end users. We anticipate the team will face all the challenges of a real start-up, so that while overcoming the hurdles they will be building a more sustainable and easily adopted application.

Seattle and Philadelphia want to address very similar opportunities in their cities. Both cities have active community groups, however they are often unconnected from one another: by nature this diffuses their collective effectiveness and makes it more difficult for government to engage with them. Seattle’s OurNeighborhood project will enable the city to collaborate with its citizens using effective social networking technology, and empower neighbors to more easily work with each other. Through OurNeighborhood, the public safety infrastructure of Seattle will be complemented by a powerful network of helpful citizens coordinating with the city to keep streets safe. The project will leverage the rich ecosystem of existing services with APIs to connect to citizens’ existing online identities, communities, and information streams.

Much like Seattle, Philadelphia is looking to re-imagine the way citizens communicate within their city. Code for America Fellows will develop a web app that engages individuals and enables them to develop groups and networks that support neighborhood services. Residents will have access to critical information about their neighborhoods, connect with other citizens that are interested in similar issues or services, all while informing and staying connected to government so it can better serve its citizens.

Boulder County is committed to the idea that “Every Door is the Right Door”: when residents need assistance, they should have direct access to vital local governmental services. To realize that public service goal, the county, in collaboration with area municipalities, is partnering with Code for America to build a one-stop interactive hub for citizens to learn about, help improve, and request county and local services.

The District of Columbia is a leader in the local Gov 2.0 space with data feeds, app contests, and commitments to open source and transparency principles. Code for America Fellows will work with DC staff to replicate the success of their city’s Gov 2.0 efforts through the development of a CivicCommons, an open-source repository of programs, policy information, and case studies. This repository will also serve as a place for Code for America applications to be made available to all other cities through an easy-to-use interface with supporting documentation on how to install and implement.

We look forward to iterating on these project concepts over the next five months and will share the progress of our brainstorming sessions with you in a series of blog posts, so stay tuned. We’re just getting started.

Their responses inspired us, so we put this video together to share their inspiration with you:

If you’re ready to see what’ll happen when the talent of the tech industry goes to work innovating city government, join us and apply to be a Code for America Fellow: http://codeforamerica.org/fellows

Today is a big day for Code for America. It’s the first day the organization will have a full-time employee besides myself, because Alissa Black starts as our City Program Director today. Don’t get me wrong, this has been a huge collective effort so far. We’ve been blessed with talented and generous volunteers (of whom Alissa has been one), skilled part-timers, and an active board of directors (a big shout out here to Tim O’Reilly, who has been a tireless and hugely effective advocate for our efforts, and without whom we would not be where we are today). But in terms of full-time staff, it’s been just me until today.

You may already know what a big fan I am of Alissa’s from my Ada Lovelace Day post, and I am thrilled that the cities working with us on our first cycle will be in her capable hands. The even better news is that Alissa is joined later this week by an equally talented third CfA employee, Dan Melton, our new technical director. You may recall us recruiting for this position; how could we have known what a perfect candidate awaited us. With a doctorate in Public Affairs and Economics, a passion for cities, civic action, and open data, and a list of projects that could not be more relevant to CfA if we designed them for ourselves, he’s a perfect fit, and we’re eager to welcome him to the Bay Area. He’ll be moving from Kansas City in the coming months.

I can’t talk about the CfA team without a huge public thanks to our summer “intern” Abhi Nemani. Intern is in quotes there because while Abhi has certainly done his share of moving furniture, shopping for equipment, and cleaning whiteboards (he taught me how to erase dry-erase ink that’s been there for more than a decade: first, you write over it with new ink –genius!), he’s so on target, so perceptive and creative, and has such capacity that I’d happily work for him. If only he weren’t going to Google in September. In the meantime, we have him to thank for our online donation set up, our fellows pages on the website, our binary art t-shirts and posters, some patriotic inspiration, two almost clean whiteboards, and so much more. I can’t wait to see Abhi as part of our team as it evolves, and hope that we can benefit from his 20% of his talents when Google gets him. Lucky Google.

We have a few more hires to make, but I’m thrilled about the talent we’ve attracted and excited to see this team deliver on the promises we’ve made.  There’s an enormous amount of work to do, but we have a clean slate, a clear mission, enormous support from across the country, and now the right team to make it all happen. Let the fun begin.

We can start, I think, by remembering what these great moments have in common. These generations of Americans realized their time was marked by a opportunity to make progress — be it political, cultural, or economic — and they seized it to make history. And this generation, a generation evidently eager to do the same, should realize that we too can make a difference, in our own way. And that the world needs us to.

This desire for impact is well documented. Not only are we Millennials interested in the world around us, but we are also committed to being involved positively in it. The former is strikingly seen in the impressive participation rate in the past election. Students and young adults were engaged by both parties, taking part in campaign activities and voting at the polls at the highest rate in the past 50 years. And even after we turned the page on the poetry of the campaign, we have remained interesting in the prose of day-to-day service. The National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 27 percent of graduating seniors in 2009 plan to work for nonprofit groups or government; another survey by the Partnership for Public Service found that 90 percent would be interested in a federal government job. And according to UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, 66.3 percent of college freshmen said it is “essential or very important” to help others — the highest percentage in 25 years. This generation spends more hours in community volunteer work and service projects than any generation before it. This blend of political action and public service means that we want to show our patriotism through action — inside government and out. We want to serve our country.

But the nature of that service need not be defined by the traditional models of the past. As a recent Pew study, found, we realize that our generation is unique, and what makes us unique? “Technology use,” most of us said. This survey, fittingly titled “The Millenials: Confident, Connected, Open to Change,” went on to describe the profound role of technology for this generation: “Millennials’ technological exceptionalism is chronicled throughout the survey. It’s not just their gadgets — it’s the way they’ve fused their social lives into them… Millennials have been leading technology enthusiasts.” We live our lives online, and we have realized that technology can be used to make life better — more so than any other demographic. Technological innovation, the survey concludes, is the Millenials’ badge of generational identity; it is who we are.

And it’s what we should do.

What we bring to the table is an eagerness to serve, a passion for change, and a comfort with modern technologies: all things in high-demand for governments, struggling to provide essential services because of out-of-control budgets and outdated processes. The very tools we use casually everyday are in need urgently inside government, from the State Department to City Hall.

Tech volunteers working with the Crisis Commons made a huge difference in the Haiti Earthquake relief earlier this year; grassroots mappers using homebrew balloons and camera rigs are helping to track the Gulf oil spill. Others are crowdsourcing investigative journalism, or building tools for government transparency.

But it’s not just grand crises that call for our involvement; making the world a better place begins right where we live.

And one of the biggest problems government has today is doing more with less.

Consider for example traditional 311 services. If you’re walking along the street and see a street light out, what can you do? You can get out your cell, call the city to report it; a municipal worker has to pick up the call, transcribe the information, submit it to the public works department manually, and then send staff out to document your report. This costs the city money and time, and just as importantly, who really wants to close Facebook or stop texting to make that call? That’s just not how we communicate. If technology has already changed the way we work, and the way we talk, why can’t it change the way we govern? It can. The Open311 API, for example, allows developers and entrepreneurs to build simple but powerful apps which make it easy to report issues: you just tweet it. And that’s just the start.

This kind of innovation is about more than just fixing potholes. It’s about re-imagining governance for the 21-century — helping government catch up with us, move as quickly as we do, and speak in our terms.

That’s what we’re about here at Code for America.

It’s time we have our own American Revolution.

Code for America was itself inspired in part by my mentor Tim O’Reilly exhorting us all to attempt bigger, harder, more important problems; this theme in his work came first as a call to hackers to “work on stuff that matters” and more poetically to “being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings” in his ETech keynote in 2008.  More recently he took up that theme in a government context, reminding the audience at the Gov 2.0 Expo last month that the outcomes worth fighting for may not be achieved on Internet time.  I found that talk well worth watching, so I’m including it below.

But I’m equally interested in the small of government, the daily care and feeding that makes a community work.  I spent last week in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, population 3200, staying at the home of the mayor and his family. (They are family friends I’ve known my whole life, what we call “framily.”)  This was my second trip since Lewis had become mayor in his retirement, and I was struck by how much time he spent on his cell phone, dealing with the day to day issues of a community, from signing loan documents for an upgrade to the waste water systems to dealing with a stray dog in the road.  For a job that pays $27.50 every three months (yes, that’s not a typo!), it looks like a 24-hour gig.

Tishomingo’s landscape features an invasive weed called Johnson grass, so walks around the town with Lewis involve stopping and pulling out these tall, rough plants from the side of the road in Tishomingo’s beautiful, lush landscape.  Weeding is something I’ve always found hugely satisfying, and a special treat to do when traveling, because it requires knowing what’s a desired species and what’s a nuisance in that area.  You have to weed with locals.

It also turns out it’s more fun to pick up trash with locals. The city had recently put better trash cans with lids that don’t blow off down by the swimming hole, and as we left there we each practiced the “pick up three pieces of garbage before you leave” rule that my daughter learned at her school.  When you’re the mayor, evening walks include a giant plastic bag that you fill up with bottles, cans and other garbage along your route, and sometimes the provenance of that garbage.  Lewis pointed out the spot along the road where the small bottles of gin turned to bottles of mouthwash as we neared the home of one resident with a drinking problem and the need to hide it from his family.  I got the feeling Lewis and his wife Floy had been picking up this man’s litter for a long time, and expected to continue to do so.  It was part of the fabric of their community.

Government is a mechanism for making society work, for allowing groups of people to live together in some degree of harmony, and to achieve more collectively than they could individually.  The needs of the group are the needs of the individual writ large, and societies, like each of us, have both grand ambitions and day-to-day needs.  What the dialogue around “open cities,” gov 2.0, or whatever else you want to call it is telling us, is that if we want to stop fighting about big government versus small government, spending and intrusion, we need to start thinking about big government plus small government, our lofty ambitions and the thoughtful service of our every day needs, and most importantly, our part as citizens in both.  At this point in the evolution of our society, neither big government nor small government is possible as an outsourced, packaged service that we simply buy and forget about.  It just doesn’t work.  The costs of vending machine government, both financial and otherwise, have gotten too high.  We must all learn to pull weeds when we walk, and we must all reach for goals that at first seem as outlandish as putting a man on the moon, sequencing the human genome, or launching a satellite network that would one day make it possible to pinpoint your location within a few meters.

Check out all eight, and if you think we’ve missed one, let us know at @codeforamerica. Share, print, and post them to spread the word, and help others see how we’re all — coders old and new — speaking the same language.

Our 2011 Fellows Application is available here.  Applications are due August 15th at 9am pacific time, but don’t wait until then to apply.  We may ask you for additional information once we see your application, and the more time  you give us, the better your chances of being selected.  Folks selected for interviews will be contacted by September 1.

Who are we looking for?  Anyone with the skills and passion to make cities work better using technology.  Many of you will be starting your careers, but others of you will have been working on the web for years and just want a chance to do something important and altruistic.  All of you will want to see your work make a difference to cities and change how government works.

We are building small project teams here, so we’re not just looking for developers.  We need designers, product managers, and researchers.  We need folks who can bring new technologies into city governments and help spread change.  We need passionate, smart, diplomatic people who get how it could work better, and can convince others of the value of trying something new.

Please help spread the word about the fellows program to anyone you think may be interested.  Information on the program is here, but check back for updates as we are working on several enhancements the program.  This is the first year for Code for America so we don’t have all the answers yet, but we’re working hard to put all the pieces together.  But no piece is more important than getting the right people to raise their hands and say “I’m in. I want to help.”  Can I see a few hands?

We had planned to announce the cities chosen for the first Code for America cycle this week, but Jolie O’Dell over at Mashable beat us to it. We’re at Web 2.0 Expo this week and Jolie got the scoop visiting our booth. In any case, we’re excited to have chosen five cities whose applications reflect a deep understanding of the power the web as a platform can bring to cities.  Each of these applicants demonstrated not only cutting-edge thinking and a willingness to invest in long-term change, but also a fantastic idea for a web app that will make their city (and any other city who wants to use it) more efficient, transparent and participatory.

The cities chosen for the first Code for America cycle are:

• Boston, MA
• Philadelphia, PA
• District of Columbia
• Seattle, WA
• Boulder, CO

What’s next for the cities chosen?  Well, we have a lot of work to accomplish between now and the time the fellows will come on board in January 2011. Part of the promise of CfA is to bring the best thinking from the web industry together with the best thinking from cities, and as part of that agenda we will be planning brainstorm days with each city, when we invite web industry innovators and thought leaders to meet with the key stakeholders inside city hall and further develop the opportunities inherent in the projects they’ve proposed. We’ll be documenting this process and blogging about it here, so stand by for more detail on these cities projects as they evolve over the coming months.

In the meantime, we extend both our congratulations and our gratitude to all the cities who applied, and look forward to working with these five bold, innovative civic leaders over the next year and a half.

Speaking of vision, one self-serving reason I’m such a fan of Alissa’s is that she immediately understood the vision of Code for America and has been instrumental in bringing it to life.  It’s a wonderful experience when someone not only gets what you’re trying to achieve and believes in it, but actually understands it better than you do, and adds to and refines that vision every time she engages with it.  Alissa’s background has informed her ideas of where cities can go: she was a project team manager for New York City’s 3-1-1 from 2004 to 2006, during which time that system grew and evolved dramatically.  Then, after a year in the private sector, she landed in San Francisco, where she works with city departments to understand how technology can help them, and now supervises the team of business analysts doing just that.  I can tell you from experience that she’s a great listener (listening being one of the truly undervalued skills of our time) and so understands issues to a great depth. She works through obstacles skillfully and patiently, and most importantly, she understands how technology can make society a better place.  She holds the big picture firmly in view while she sweats the small stuff with grace.

In addition to her work with San Francisco, Alissa has driving a business analysis process for the cities who’ve applied for the first cycle of Code for America.  This means that when we choose the cities who will be involved the first year, we’ll have a strong understanding of what we’re getting into, and what the Fellows are going to need to do to be successful.  Her generosity is matched only by her professionalism, and we’d be dead in the water without her.

Ada Lovelace Day is intended to honor women in technology, and like last year, when I wrote about Carolyn Lawson (who is now doing even more cool things at the state level—look for news there soon), I’m choosing to honor women in government technology because I believe this is where we’ll see the biggest impact on our lives in the next five years.  I’ve also chosen both women because they are real unsung heroes.  Thank you for all that you do!