This weekend the Code for America fellows shipped out. As one of the four members on Team Chicago, I arrived at O’Hare on Saturday night with a month’s worth of luggage in tow and caught a taxi to what would be my home for February. As a fellow serving with the City of Chicago, our focus is on the city’s system for responding to resident inquires and service requests and—as luck would have it—this taxi ride would be my first interaction with that system: Chicago 311.

After exchanging pleasantries, Sayid, my driver, asked me what I was in town for. I explained that over the coming month, I’d be interviewing city staff, residents, businesses and community organizations to learn about how new technology tools and processes could improve the city’s 311 system. Sayid nodded knowingly and pointed back at the sign posted in front of me: “This is cab No. ###. All compliements or complaints should be directed to the Dept of Consumer Services 24-hour hotline. Call 311.”

Sayid explained how the system did—and, from his perspective, didn’t—work for taxi drivers: when customers use the number to complain, 90 percent of the situations are the customer’s own fault. A typical negative interaction stems from a driver failing to live down to a customer’s rudely pre-conceived notions about the driver’s class, Sayid said. I asked Sayid about the compliments; he replied that customers thank him in the cab and with their tip, not by calling the city. If someone tells you to make it easier to complain about cabbies, Sayid said, that would make it easier for him to lose his job.

The situations Sayid described reminded me of something that San Francisco Mayor Chief of Staff Steve Kawa said when the fellows visited San Francisco City Hall. Kawa explained the difficulty of governing by statistics at a city scale: while San Francisco has an unemployment rate of 7.8 percent (less than the national average), that still means 60,500 residents—real people—are without work and living within San Francisco’s just 7 x 7 mile borders. At the scale of a city every constituency is personified and the city must be accountable to them.

Connecting these two perspectives—of my taxi driver Sayid and San Francisco Chief of Staff Kawa—makes me realize how important it is that the technology I build as a Code for America fellow meets the needs of all residents: accessibly, efficiently, transparently, and importantly, fairly. Building something that captures just one perspective or one side of the story can have an impact on real individuals—not just statistics—like one of Chicago’s 6,951 taxicabs: Sayid’s.

Prologue: I called Chicago 311 to register a compliment for Sayid. I hope he receives it.

In theory, cities hire Chief Information Officers (CIO) to be their leaders in providing their decision makers this data. In practice, this isn’t happening as planned. As witnessed in various city strategic technology initiatives, municipal CIOs struggle to devote meaningful and strategic resources towards the development and management of meaningful data. Instead, they often spend their time being the Chief “Infrastructure” Officer; spending significant resources on the maintenance and upgrade of basic technology infrastructure, rather than new and better data resources to assist city leaders and citizens in making informed decisions.

Much of this issue can be traced to the rise of the client-server model. The role of the CIO was formulated during this rise, forcing CIOs to take on significant duties to maintain and refresh all kinds of different clients and servers necessary for the client-server data exchange to work. This trend continues today. A quick scan of cities’ strategic technology initiatives reveals many infrastructure projects, such as server virtualization or Windows 7 rollouts, but few in the collection of better, more meaningful data.

Some cities attempt to rectify this by appointing a Chief Digital Officer or Chief Innovation Officers. This is a good first step because it recognizes the value of data. But it does beg the question “What’s the CIO’s job if not to provide information (data)?” Care will need to be taken to avoid fracturing a city’s technology dollars and strategic plans between a CIO and the newly minted digital or innovation officer.

Clearly, we need the “I” part of the CIO title to meaningfully relate to the provision of information services. We need municipal CIOs to spend less time on upgrading operating systems and deploying “thick” client software and more on the business of cities. This is not to say that municipal CIOs aren’t trying hard to do this. They are, but the infrastructure projects seem to be getting in the way. Jack Donahue, the faculty chairman at Harvard’s Masters in Public Policy program, described this conundrum well in an April 2011 New York Times article found here. Governments hold on to the commodity (another word for infrastructure) jobs but, have been unable to build the higher level “data analysis” and strategic consulting jobs. Information technology is no different.

Given the budget pressures within city governments, it’s not likely that CIOs grow their way out of this problem. Something has to give and the only short term mechanism to accomplish this is to move some of the infrastructure to the “cloud.” The cloud has been well discussed over the last couple of years, but it’s less clear what municipal CIOs’ overall plans are for leveraging the cloud to recapture the mantle of being the cities’ information leader. A city’s journey to the cloud is just beginning. However, the real move towards realigning the CIOs role won’t happen until we realize that providing better data is inextricably linked with moving away from IT infrastructure management. That is the challenge of today’s CIO.

Logan is the Chief Information Security Officer for the City of Portland. You can follow him at @PortlandInfoSec or email him at logan.kleier[@]portlandoregon.gov.

Disclaimer: These opinions are my own and do not represent the views of the City of Portland.

Today, Code for America is happy to announce we’ll be one of the F/OSS sponsors — meaning we’ll be partnering with PyCon in helping spread information on our values, the use of open-source technologies, and Python. We’re incredibly excited to go!

We started the morning with amazing guest speakers, Jack Dangermond and Clint Brown of ESRI, who shared with us a wealth of knowledge about mapping. I was blown away by all the data that already existed and all the different types of data visualization that was possible with maps. At the Code for America Institute, fellows are encouraged to be curious in order to get to the root of the problem and mapping is an exceedingly powerful visual tool that aides us in this effort.

In the afternoon, we kicked off the main event of the day, a Civic Hackathon. Going into the day I had some insecurities about being a graphic designer in an event that seemed so “code-centric,” but my worries turned out to be a non-factor. The exceptionally beautiful thing about a hackathon is, you don’t have to be a coder to participate. There’s ample room for designers, lawyers, geographers, city officials, and anyone who has an interest and wants to contribute.

The project that I worked on was a redesign of the Open311.org front page by building on the work that 2011 Fellow Scott Silverman had already created. The result is this, which I think is a pretty good start for a project I would love to continue working on. I’m also proud to say that this project placed 3rd in the hackathon behind extremely worthy winners – SF311.me by Zach Williams and Jessica Lord, and The Antiques Roadshow Scraper by Serena Wales.

By the time the prizes were handed out, it was past 7:00 p.m. We had spent the majority of our Saturday in the office and yet we were still in fantastic spirits and had cheered each other on from the beginning to the end of the day. Several of us grabbed a quick dinner together and spent the rest of the evening celebrating the end of our first full week as 2011 Code for America Fellows. It’s hard to remember the last time I had so much fun.

So that’s the story of my first hackathon. What I loved the most about the event was, it was essentially a group of motivated people getting together in the same space and solving problems. With the steady stream of food and beverages, conversations with colleagues, and a little bit of friendly competition, the hackathon was a perfect storm for building products. It was a day of knowledge, community, and productivity without burdens. I think it’s safe to say that I’m thoroughly hooked and I can’t wait to participate in (and maybe win!) my next hackathon.

1. We connected with civic hacker communities throughout the country. More cities join weekly. These “alpha” cities have agreed to work together to develop the first iteration of the Brigade program.
2. A forum was established for discussion of program and platform development. Forum membership is moderated, and all discussion is visible to the general public.
3. We talked to the creators and maintainers of apps that we’ll adopt and deploy during the alpha program. Apps include Adopta, Foo Mapper, Open Data Catalog, and PDXAPI. Each of these have demonstrated viability and sustainability for the cities in which they have been used.
4. CfA staff participated in an inception event facilitated by Parker Thompson of Pivotal Labs. The eight hour session generated the product design for the Brigade’s web platform.
5. The first call among alpha cities was held on Friday, January 20.

On the horizon: Fellows will host events in each of their cities on February 25. We are targeting this date for simultaneous Brigade events. Contact Jack Madans to participate where you live.

The MBTI is a test developed during the 40′s and 50′s from Carl Jung’s theory of personality types. Used across industry, academia, and society, its goal is “to understand and appreciate differences between people.” The idea is that by examining our natural tendencies, and the — at times opposing — tendencies of others, we can prepare ourselves for the clashes of style and perspective that inevitably arise from working closely with others. Which is not to say that such differences necessarily create conflict. When acknowledged as equally valid approaches with something unique to offer, they can be combined into awesome team power-harmony.

The MBTI delineates four pairs of traits, each pair illustrating a particular axis of one’s personality, resulting in sixteen distinct personalities. The first pair deals with one’s “favorite world;” introversion-dominant types prefer their own inner world,  while extraversion-dominant types prefer and are energized by the outer world. The second pair examines how we perceive the world around us and process information; sensing-types tend to prefer hard data about the physical world gleaned through their senses, and intuition-types pay more attention to the “patterns and possibilities” they see. The third axis describes how we make decisions; thinking-types like to put more weight on “objective principles and impersonal facts,” while feeling-types like to maintain interpersonal harmony, giving more weight to the thoughts and feelings of those involved. The final pair makes a distinction between two ”orientations to the outer world.” To others, judging-types appear to lead an orderly and “decided” lifestyle, as opposed to perceiving-types who seem to enjoy a more “flexible and adaptable” lifestyle.

My own type turned out to be ENTP: Extraverted Intuition with Thinking.

While most of our results were split 50/50 across each dichotomy, we discovered an interesting abundance of intuition-leaning types, (as opposed to sensing) among the 2012 class of fellows. While an estimated 75 percent of the general population is characterized as sensing (S), our group was exactly the opposite, with 75 percent of our group leaning towards intuition (N). As an N-type on a team of N-types, I’ll have great company during our swims through the troposphere of hunches and grand ideas. Yet we must take extra care that our musings remain grounded in the hard-facts of reality, lest we float away…

During the event Dr. Biden reminded us all that she herself is an military wife and that “we all have a role to play in supporting our military.”

Dr. Biden went on to say, ”You are a great example of what we want to ask all Americans to do. As innovators…you find new and creative ways to solve problems. Thank you for unleashing your tremendous creativity in support of our service members.”

Read the liveblog. View photos.

Here’s the video from the event:

I don’t think I’ve seen a poor presentation or talk at Code for America, but a couple were exceptionally effective. They consistently had simple slides meant to remind us of a focal point. They reiterated critical points and paced the message, so we had time to reflect and absorb. The speakers also articulated the message well without sounding scripted.

This week also reminded me that lack of communication is a very common form of poor communication. An interesting game theory exercise demonstrated how parties can make wildly different assumptions that never get challenged if those parties don’t talk. Fortunately I haven’t encountered something so extreme yet in the program. But occasionally I talk to someone and find out we have more in common than I realized. Even when I find out that our opinions differ, that’s real information that I can take to the bank. Otherwise, I just have vague assumptions, often implicit.

The Detroit team had our first call with our city contact, Samara Bradley, and I really enjoyed it. We learned interesting facts about Detroit, heard some exciting anecdotes, and shared a little about ourselves. We also set a strong stage for further communication, which will prove critical when we get stumped or hit roadblocks. Thanks to Samara for her part in all of that, and thanks to folks like David Eaves and DJ Patil for showing us how it’s done.

The event will start at 3pm PT. A liveblog of the event is available below, and video will be posted shortly:

Here are some pictures from the event.

On January 26 at 5:30pm, we’re hosting an Open House. Come have a drink and a snack, and learn about their projects, and discuss what comes next.

All are welcome! RSVP below or on Eventbrite: http://www.eventbrite.com/edit?msg=1&saved=1&eid=2769330141

(Note: we hope to host this event at our new offices, but as construction is still underway, we may end up at our current space. RSVP, and we’ll be sure to keep you up-to-date.)