How Hacking City Policy Can Improve the Public Realm

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody. – Jane Jacobs

Cities are at their best when they change with their citizens; when, to quote Rebar principal Matthew Passmore, “a city’s evolution keeps pace with its own cultural evolution.” Unfortunately, cities are often preventing themselves from doing just that — from being responsive enough to their own changing dynamics to continue existing as accurate reflections of and platforms for their own cultures. Outdated permitting processes are keeping a large swath of promising projects in art, design, technology, and other modes of expression from ever becoming part of the urban landscape. Along the way, cities are missing opportunities to add economic and cultural value in a time of constrained resources.

In other words: cities can be more healthy, engaging, beautiful, and productive if they make it easier for citizens to contribute to making them so.

Historically, projects that alter the public realm have been generally divided into two camps: those that play by the rules (city-sanctioned installations, community murals) and those that don’t (graffiti, vandalism). Recently, this dichotomy has been disrupted by projects that make practical and aesthetic improvements to public space — but don’t always ask for permission. This approach is driven by citizens with the passion to improve their cities and the impatience to not wait through the full public permitting process to take action. But what if that process weren’t so intimidating, time-consuming, and costly for the average city resident? Could we make cities better, faster?

Why Civic Design Policy is Like Rocket Science

In between powerful ideas and powerful change lies powerful bureaucracy.

Internally, city governments are tasked with ensuring that public infrastructure and funds are used safely and responsibly. Permits that utilize these funds or resources are, for good reason, a big part of this.

But from an outside perspective – for community members, designers, artists, architects, makers — the process of getting a project approved and permitted by city departments might as well be rocket science. The entire tactical urbanism movement exists largely as a band-aid solution for citizens who lack the resources, time, or patience to navigate this complex approval system, and prefer taking matters into their own hands to create local change. A key question moving forward is how this process can be opened up to look less like rocket science, and more like the DIY science kits that turn kids everywhere into excited, engaged brainstormers. How can we make the permitting process sexier to better engage the average citizen?

Let’s get into the details a little bit. Say you want to install an Urban Prototyping project like Urban Parasol in your city — attaching a modular shade structure to a light pole. In San Francisco, the light pole you’re attaching to is managed by SFPUC, the sidewalks people are standing on underneath your structure are managed by SFDPW, and the street thoroughfare your overhang stretches above is managed by SFMTA. You might need permits and approvals from all of these agencies before you even think of hitting the street — and often, existing permits aren’t set up to handle these types of ideas.

While you’re at it, you might want to talk to someone in the San Francisco Arts Commission, City Administrator’s Office, Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services, or your local Community Benefit District about gaining local support for the project. Then you’ll need to make sure it doesn’t make the area less beautiful, more dangerous, or more prone to attract noisy late-night revelry in the eyes of the neighbors nearby. And finally, you’ll also need a way to pay for the material costs, and find a way to get your work paid for if you’re not planning to donate your time as a civic volunteer. All of this work is on top of the citizens’ principal focus of creating the best public art piece, design intervention, or interactive installation they possibly can — which is a huge job in itself.

Understandably, it’s hard for most citizens who want to contribute to know where to begin. The process isn’t made easier by the fact that most government websites are difficult to navigate (though there are exceptions!), and most departments don’t have a liaison dedicated to making this process easy and accessible for the community.

Better permits will allow artists and designers to focus more on what they’re good at — creating great civic projects – while allowing city planners to focus on their own invaluable strengths — navigating the crucial regulatory nuances of City Hall that can make these projects a reality.

Why It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

Cities want to help you, and the barriers aren’t as big as you think.

Here’s the good news: the obstacles to getting public design projects approved, built, and installed are actually not as complicated as they seem – and they’re pretty much exactly what you would think they are. In speaking with city officials in several San Francisco agencies recently, they all outlined the same five barriers as the root causes of bureaucratic slowness and difficulty. I’ve listed these below, along with some basic steps toward getting around them:

1) Liability + injury potential: Perhaps the biggest obstacle from a legal perspective is determining who is responsible if someone is injured or otherwise harmed directly or indirectly by a project. Most projects need someone to cover liability associated with them, which sometimes means working out a deal with the city or a local business owner who already has a policy in place. This can be tricky but certainly isn’t impossible, and could be streamlined by the city to make it even easier — for example, by creating a guide that helps citizens understand the liability process and their options for getting approved.

2) Citizen complaints: Many projects can be derailed due to concerns from locals over issues like noise, aesthetics, traffic, or safety. Working with the community and conducting preliminary testing and meetings before a full installation can go a long way toward easing the public’s mind and garnering support for a project.

3) Funding + procurement: Procurement requirements – standards for the entities and people that can provide services to and receive funding from the city – can be a barrier for individual citizens and smaller organizations to create real projects that take advantage of city improvement funds and other public funding. There are a few easy ways to help remedy this: designers and artists can work through nonprofits and firms that are already city vendors; the city can make it easier for citizens to both become vendors and/or connect with existing vendors; and the city can also fast-track projects with external funding (from grants, individuals, or crowd funding) to increase the value they are able to capture from outside City Hall.

4) Lack of interagency dialog: Every city has a web of responsibilities that is often spread across a complicated web of departments and individuals. However, most cities lack an interagency review board or task force to streamline the process of approving public design projects. Others make it difficult for departments to simply talk to each other, making it harder to find the creative regulatory solutions sometimes necessary to bring projects to life. We’ve started forming an Urban Prototyping Task Force in San Francisco to help get the ball rolling on these issues, and a culture of dialog can also be taken much further when it is promoted from the top by a visionary mayor or planning director.

5) Lack of a good public interface: As mentioned above, there’s generally no central government touch point for citizens who want to design for the public realm. Ideally this touch point should be a combination of 1) well-designed and accessible informational resources and 2) dedicated staff members to support them and interface with the public directly. In San Francisco, we’re fortunate to have the SF Better Streets initiative — a simply fantastic effort that gets closer to this interface than anything else I’ve personally seen.

Finally, most city staff members I’ve met with are just as frustrated with the typical regulatory process as we on the outside are — and they’re actively looking for great new citizen-led projects and the means to take them forward. This may be somewhat unique to San Francisco, birthplace of the parklet, but my sense from speaking with officials in other cities is that the broader culture is changing — the permits themselves just haven’t been able to catch up yet.

Where We Go From Here

We know the problems – so let’s start tackling them together.

If the good news is that barriers to permitting civic design projects are well-known and surmountable, the better news is that many cities are already heading in the right direction. San Francisco’s groundbreaking work creating the parklet permit has been well-documented, and Boston’s City Hall To Go program is another great example of making city services and processes more accessible to the general public. Even more importantly, the conversations between City Hall insiders and outsiders — those in need of city approvals and those providing them — have become much more frequent and robust in recent years – a welcome change from the sometimes stereotypical bureaucratic Iron Curtain. Technology and new forms of engagement are only making these interactions easier.

To be clear, “hacking” the permitting process — rethinking it to make it more efficient, effective, and attractive — isn’t necessarily going to be easy, fast, or fun. It took about five years to formally establish the parklet permitting process in San Francisco. If we’re going to hack city policy successfully, our best tool is the continued dialog between citizens and government. Understanding each others’ needs and contexts is the first step to change, and it’s already starting to happen today.

Every citizen can be a part of this change by tracking down supportive officials in the right departments, sharing successful project examples, and organizing open discussions (like this one) to promote understanding and (most importantly) action. Together, we can ensure that better permits will create better cities.

We’re trying to address a lot of these issues and concerns through our work with Urban Prototyping. Our first UP San Francisco Festival saw the creation of 23 prototype projects, some of which are already starting to be replicated in other cities around the world. The process to create each project has been completely documented through Instructables, where the projects have been collectively viewed over 50,000 times. We plan to build this into an open Urban Prototyping Library which serves as a sort of physical civic GitHub.

At a higher level, we’re planning to spend the next few months open-sourcing our model of bringing ideas from prototypes to city-approved pilot projects. We think using large-scale, city-supported festivals to publicly test and gain visibility for projects will help create better outcomes for cities while not stifling the creativity of their greatest asset — their residents. To ensure the best ideas live on, host cities would commit to piloting at least two to three projects from their festival, in partnership with City Hall. Together, we hope the components of this model can help take this movement from a scattered collection of compelling ideas to a global force for change.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear your feedback on UP, and your ideas for how we can all make permits just a little bit sexier.

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.

In addition to the cost benefit, RFP-EZ also attracted more than 270 businesses who had never before approached the Federal government for a contract. With results like these it’s no wonder that the project team is already working on RFP-EZ version two.

The announcement comes just days after Presidential Innovation Fellow and RFP-EZ’s team member Clay Johnson wrote a three-part series about government procurement strategies.

As Johnson and our chief strategist Abhi Nemani suggest, better procurement technology increases transparency and lowers the barrier to entry for competition. While RFP-EZ was created in just six months with the full project code available on GitHub, it’s services like these that allow vendors to search for government contract opportunities in plain language while also receiving 24-7 insight into competitive offers. The result is that the government receives good value on its services while offering a chance for diverse new innovators to emerge.

In keeping with CfA’s belief that procurement is a great place to start to improve innovation in our communities, we encourage those civic startups with procurement solutions to consider our accelerator program. If you’ve been following the federal story and you’ve got great ideas on how to fix procurement or are looking to disrupt the civic tech industry, apply for to the CfA Accelerator: codeforamerica.org/accelerator by May 31, 2013.

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.

“If you are available to do so, can you come into the joint info center for a bit to help me with few SM (social media) issues.”

In the past, I had worked with the City of Colorado Springs Communications Division helping develop a social media strategy. Seeing this experience as potentially useful in this latest emergency, I joined the Joint Information Center (JIC) and began tweeting on behalf of the City, Mayor, Sheriff, County Health, and Police and Fire Departments.

In a separate report, I have discussed in detail the sequence of events during the fire, the high-pressure environment in the JIC, and the heroism and community spirit that arose in Colorado Springs. In this blog post, I’d like to share a five social media lessons we learned as an official source of information for Colorado Springs during a crisis situation.

1. Get a dashboard in place

Throughout the fire, we used Hootsuite to control the multiple official Colorado Springs Twitter accounts. There are a number of dashboards available, but we chose Hootsuite because of my previous familiarity with its interface and features. Having a central dashboard allowed us to post a message simultaneously across all accounts and manage their status all in one location. Many dashboards include analytics to keep track of which posts are having the greatest impact and reaching the most people.

2. Respect the community

In social media, the community decides everything. As the official account, you are a part of the conversation, but you are only one participant. Want to change the hashtag? Good luck — you can’t force people to use your vocabulary. The city is but one source of information in the social media community.

Social media has natural hubs and key influencers. Use them well as these can be your greatest asset. If key influencers are misinformed, focus on engaging them — this will provide maximum impact in spreading better information.

The community can naturally self-correct. There were several times during the fire when members of the Twitter community corrected erroneous tweets before we (as the “official” Twitter accounts) could get to them. Everyone had a stake in communicating truthfully, so we were all on the same team.

3. Be forgiving — of yourself and others

Digital communication removes the tone of voice from your messages. Remember that everyone is under stress, and everyone cares about the community. Choppy or terse comments can offend and get in the way of relating to your community.

4. Use your calm moments wisely

Sometimes, there is no new information to release. Use these times to host a Q&A, address direct messages, and thank your key influencers. Oh, and get some coffee — it’s gonna be another long night.

5. Take notes

The best thing to come out of a disaster is learning something that you can share to help others. Take notes and share your experiences with those that can use them in the future. If you’d like to read my whole report on using social media during the Waldo Canyon Fire, you can find it here.
 

 

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.

For the past decade, I directed the technology needs and efforts of celebrated San Francisco studio Stamen Design. Together, we created new ways of mapping the world, new ways of seeing data, and balanced an abundance of commercial, artistic, and research projects. I especially valued the opportunity to support the design process through code, developing libraries and systems that supported Stamen’s creative vision in projects for ourselves and others.

America

Last year, I volunteered with the Obama For America tech team in Chicago and saw a new path forward for political and civic technology. OFA’s approachable, election-winning tech strategy was a blend of creative opportunism and applied experience, and I left deeply inspired. But where else could I bring my technology experience to bear on social challenges? There’s no better place than local city and county governments to try and test new approaches to civic technology. No place more in need of simple, straightforward ideas for communication and process learned from web-based experimentation. No place better prepared to teach the technology world about the dynamism of collective action.

CfA

Code for America has been an inspiration to me since I first met Jennifer Pahlka at an event introducing San Francisco’s DataSF portal to the world with Stamen’s Crimespotting application and then Mayor Gavin Newsom. At Stamen, we provided Code for America office space during their very first year (they were a staff of four then), and I’ve long kept in close touch with the growth of the organization over last few years.

Today, I have an opportunity to help directly.

As Code for America’s new Chief Technology Officer, I will be working on CfA’s core technologies, bridging the gap between rapidly-iterated applications and tools usable more broadly throughout our peer network. I’m excited to help fellows get new projects off the ground, adapt projects for long-term sustainability, and prepare their work for future generations of fellows. I’m especially excited to explore and define the points of contact between Silicon Valley’s agile approaches to development and government’s need for simplicity and reliability.

I’m proud to be stepping into this role at a cuspy moment in CfA’s history. We’ve proven that it’s possible to have a different conversation between citizens and their governments, and that in this century, technology plays a critical role in that change.  Now I want to help prove that it’s a lasting change.

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.

At Code for America, we’re getting excited for the National Day of Civic Hacking; the weekend is a galvanizing moment in our ongoing movement to call citizens to action. We want citizens everywhere to help their cities work better, through technology. Why do we think this is so important?

We put together a list of 10 reasons why civic hacking is good for cities:

1. Creates space for innovation (for government and citizens)

Every week in cities across the country, local government officials and civic-minded volunteers (developers, designers, urban planners, policy wonks, etc.) come together to collaborate on web apps and technologies to make their communities work better. In the Code for America Brigade network alone, there are regular hack nights in more than 25 cities. These hack nights create a space for government and citizens to come together to solve interesting challenges.

2. Engages digital citizens in the process of governance and creative problem solving

Civic hacking offers new opportunities for citizens and government to connect. For example, as San Diego’s Code for America Brigade Captain, Jeff Johnson spoke in front of the city council  about participatory budgeting and how transparency, crowdsourced community input, and crowdfunding projects could tie in.

3. Spurs economic opportunity

NYC BigApps 2013 competition is put on by the city to stimulate the development of applications that improve access to information and government transparency; to encourage innovation and the creation of new intellectual property with commercial potential; and to help leverage technology to solve select city challenges and problems.

4. Provides insight into government decision making

Technologies built by civic hackers such as Open Budget Oakland or Look at Cook provide deeper insight into government decision making. Open Budget Oakland is an app that allows citizens to easily dive into different allocations and departments to see how money is budgeted. Look at Cook allows the citizens of Cook County, Ill. to explore the county’s budget from 1993 to 2012 and learn how the money is being spent.

5. Enables community service through technology

Apps like Adopt-a provide new opportunities for community service through technology. Through Adopt-a, citizens claim responsibility for taking care of communal infrastructures by adopting them. Through this program, citizens have already helped shovel out fire hydrants in Boston and Anchorage, sidewalks in Chicago, and check tsunami sirens in Honolulu.

6. Teaches important new tech skills

Whether at a civic hack night, hackathons, CityCamps, and other civic hacking events, you can expect to find people learning new skills such as GitHub, GIS, data visualization.

7. Creates a broad network of civic hackers

Civic hacking is a movement that is spreading rapidly across the country. As the momentum builds, networks like the Code for America Brigade allow civic-minded volunteers to connect both within and between cities to share stories and collaborate on projects. At just over a year since we started Brigade this is what our members have reported as the most valuable asset of the program.

8. Helps citizens serve themselves

Government is often best when it provides the framework for citizens working together to solve their own issues. Such is the case with technologies like Citizens Connect and Adopt-a. Whether it’s helping a neighbor get rid of a possum camped out in their trash or shoveling the sidewalk during a snowstorm, civic hacking is both the technology and the action of citizens working together.

9. Helps government manage expectations around technology

The average consumer’s expectations when it comes to mobile web technology is at an all time high. At the same time, our local government’s resources are at austerity levels. Even in the best of times we don’t have any expectations that government will have the ability to keep up with technology they way most people would like. Civic hacking helps people understand what’s doable and what isn’t.

10. Connects technology & non-technology groups together

One the most important things civic hacking does is bring people together from different backgrounds, experiences, and skill sets. It’s often the case that technologists and non-technologists are not getting enough access to one another to swap perspectives. Events like National Day of Civic Hacking, Code Across America, CityCamp, and weekly Hack Nights facilitate these important connections.

[Your example here]

We’ want to hear how civic hacking has been good for your city. Let us know on our Brigade Tumblr: http://codeforamerica.tumblr.com/submit

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.

So far we’ve talked about two ways to decrease government’s IT costs: streamlining the process that agencies use to vet and certify new businesses, and leveraging APIs to make it easier to interface with government for those registrations. These two things are important because it increases competition and thus increases quality and decreases cost. But good information technology at a low price isn’t all we’re after. We also want government to pick the right information technology for the job.

An important lesson If you’re a programmer is to take a look at Recovery.gov, which cost $18 million dollars. But why did it cost $18 million dollars? For the answer to that, let’s take a look at the RFP and the somewhat-redacted winning technical proposal written in response. If you’re a technologist, you might come to the same conclusion I did: Government is paying a reasonable amount of money for what it’s asking. The problem is that it’s asking for the wrong thing. XML Firewalls? Data-cubing services? Seriously?

So how do you fix it? One might say: “hire a consultant to look at the RFPs, and she’ll tell you what you do and don’t need.” But government already has this – both in Technical Representative Programs (COTRs) and in open requests for comments in the procurement process. Unfortunately, each has its problems; COTRs tend to work on COTRing, not on remaining up to date on technology and its costs, and in an open request for information, the people who have the best input are also the people who can do the best job. This doesn’t sound like a problem, but often times you cannot bring someone in to help steer what kind of work to do, and then do the actual work.

The long-term fix for these problems is to partially separate the RFP process from the procurement process. This helps on three fronts:

• It helps get feedback from outside the context of a particular procurement. Instead of commenting on an RFP for “this” website, we can comment on an RFP for “a” website.
• It promotes reuse. RFP content gets written over and over again, without tracking any success or results. This adds expense to the project since a), you don’t know if what you’re asking for is the right thing, and b), you’re doing work that’s repetitive.
• It improves language. By soliciting feedback from a wider community, you stop the atrocious act of using phrases like “Information Distribution and Discovery Platform.” By calling them “websites,” you’ll be using the same language that’s used by folks who do the work regularly.

One way to solve these issues is by creating an Open RFP Library. It’s something we hope to work on here at the Department, and it’s something that others (like Beth Noveck’s WorldBank/NYU Wagner collaboration on Innovative Procurement) are working on too. Imagine an open library for RFPs where a government agency can contribute their documents and share them with other agencies of all kinds, across different levels of government. And where the vendor community, the open government community, and other governments can comment on them and make them better. Imagine if people could ballpark what each RFP should cost, and imagine if you could circle back with them after the job was done to see how the work turned out.

While it would be difficult to show returns in the short term, this is a long-term play that reduces cost by making the requests better and faster. In other words: knowing what to ask for is just as important as asking the right people.

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.

We’re dedicating this week to talking about how to fix procurement. Yesterday we discussed where to start in procurement reform – fixing the registration process for businesses – and today we’re going to provide an example of one way to fix it: by upping the government’s API game.

To date, government APIs have largely been discussed as a method for expressing data to citizens. It stems from the open government’s roots in the transparency movement – that government data ought to be free, so that it can be more transparent and effective. Though most of the time, it’s the case that developers (who are really the only people who can use APIs) most government data doesn’t really require an API as much as it requires a well thought out, well formatted, and well maintained .csv file. Rarely does government data require cloud based computational capacity to add value to the raw data, and rarely does it grow so big that an API becomes more useful than managing the data locally gets unwieldy.

We need to start thinking about APIs, instead, as a method for improving the user experience of government. The registration process is a great place to start, because it’s a confusing area that’s rife with awkward user interfaces. Imagine, instead, if when you file for incorporation with LegalZoom, you’re asked to certify that you’re a woman-owned business and it instantly registers you with the SBA as such for an extra fee. Or that QuickBooks notices that you fall below the small business threshold for your given industry, and asks you if you’d like to self-certify for a fee?

If business registration entities like the GSA, the SBA, or local business development organizations create APIs around their registration processes they can leverage the private sector to compete to see who can make it the easiest and cheapest to register these businesses for working with government at the federal state and local level.

Moreover, as long as government has provided registration free of cost via its own website, it can justify charging for API access and create a revenue opportunity for itself. It’s not charging people for something taxpayers are already paying for – it’s charging businesses to enhance their existing products. Charging a nominal amount for access to this API is probably a good API to fight fraud and prevent spam, and would likely be one that the Intuits and LegalZooms of the world would gladly pass on, and probably keep the API revenue neutral. This opens the door to ethical revenue based contracting: I’d happily build an API on top of Sam.gov’s registration process for free, in order to get $1 every time someone uses that API to register a new entity.

The one trick is to make it easy to sign up for API access. We don’t want to just shift the registration burden from citizens to developers, we also want developers to be able to register easily. The IRS’s leadership in the sector with the E-Filling API – the one that empowers companies like TurboTax – is a good place to start, but the barrier still likely needs to be dialed back for things less universal than paying taxes. Usually charging a small fee per-request will filter out more fraud than stringent background check requirements.

In general, government needs more process focused APIs. Everywhere there’s a government form, there’s a case for an API, and a business ecosystem to be built on top of it. Obviously some business cases (like tax filing) are more viable than others (like Race To the Top application forms). A way to prioritize this list is using a little known system called the ICR Dashboard. The federal government has to calculate the number of “burden hours” it takes to fill out the form. The formula is simple: number of respondents times the time it takes to fill out. This system has a list of all the forms, and all the burden hour estimates.

Opportunities exist when there are high numbers of burden hours, or solely a high number of respondents. It’s unfortunate that the agency that runs this site, OIRA doesn’t provide a list of all the government forms ranked by these numbers. They do, however, provide an xml dump of all government’s forms. That’s a good list of where to start. And interestingly, leveraging an API first strategy may allow federal programs to avoid some paperwork reduction act issues (for instance, a private entity can engage in multivariate testing of a form, the federal government, ridiculously, cannot), since a private entity is actually doing the information collection.

The interesting thing about this opportunity is that for many of these is that if you don’t work for government, there’s still an opportunity for you. One needn’t wait for government to make an API. Often, you just need to understand what the form is trying to accomplish, who its customers are, and how to certify it and send it in to government.

We at the Department believe there ought to be more players in this space. So we took the XML dump, and turned it into a Google Spreadsheet. Want to see which government forms take the most time and thus have the most opportunity? Now you can.

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.

The way government purchases information technology is profoundly broken – leading to federal websites and information technology systems to sometimes cost as much as an entire scientific initiative to map the human brain. And it’s easy to complain about how much these websites cost, or about how their high prices and lengthy procurement processes don’t impact quality or user experience, but it’s not so easy to be thoughtful about how fix it. So this week, we thought we’d talk specifically about how to fix the procurement process.

Many organizations are interested in shifting the policy and regulations around to make the process easier and less cumbersome. Our own product procure.io helps focus down on making simple acquisitions easy. But before you get into acquisition policy and technology, another one has to get fixed up the chain: business registration processes. Here’s what happened when Jed Wood, our colleague on RFP-EZ, catalogued his experience trying to register his business just to be eligible to be awarded contracts:

It provides a glimpse of the process and the problem. He didn’t make it through. It’s due to poor communication: e.g. you register an “entity” not a “business” in Sam.gov, and you’re asked if arcane sections of the Federal Acquisition Regulation apply to you without links to the regulations for you to read. And it’s due to poor technology (even though Jed eventually filled out his form, the system still would not allow him to register for reasons unknown). This registration process is important – it’s not just something the federal government uses. Local governments use this central contractor registry to vet their own vendors, as do private companies: Microsoft uses this to vet its own suppliers.

Ideally, this isn’t the only process a business goes through in order to just have a chance at competing for government work. They should also try to qualify for small business certifications – like being a HubZone company, a Woman Owned small business, or just a plain and simple small business certification in order to quality. At the same time, should the business decide to work with local government, they have to go through similar processes.

These processes take a lot of time and cost a lot of money both for businesses – who are dealing with systems that often don’t work – and for government – most of these forms are paper and the tools on the inside (ironically because government can’t afford good, cheap technology) don’t work well and take a long time. It can often take a small business months just to get set up to be eligible to win contracts.

When the open government community talks about “Fixing Procurement” what we’re really talking about is making it so that the contracts don’t keep getting awarded to the same giant IT enterprise integrators over and over again. In general, our theory is that if you do that, then price will go down, and quality will go up.

The first step of that is increasing the pool of “eligible vendors” – because government is never going to have a completely open process where anybody can bid on anything. The complicated set of rules called “set-asides” are valuable social policies. They’re meant to ensure that when government does spend taxpayer dollars, they get the most “good” (by giving preference to service disabled veteran owned businesses, for instance) for those dollars. It’s not pragmatic or politically palpable to simply get rid of those programs, and the intent of them is good. But they could stand for improvement, and the first step of that is making it easy for people to register to contract, and to make it easy for the people who qualify for these programs to qualify for them.

That starts at the Small Business Administration at the federal level, and your local business development enterprise organization at the local level. Step one in solving this problem is by streamlining the user experience via software. Turn paper forms into digital ones. Make the language look great. Every place there is a PDF file and/or a fax machine in the process, there is likely room for innovation. Once these simple barriers are removed from the process, you’ll increase the contractor pool and ensure more diversity in the procurement ecosystem.

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.

Calling all repo managers, coders, designers, civic-minded volunteers: we want you!

Today we’re kicking off The Great American Civic Hack—a three-month campaign to clean up the top civic repos and make them fork and merge ready.

The campaign will feature four to six repos for national collaboration. The managers of these repos will identify issues, milestones, and deadlines. Civic hackers can jump on these projects to do what we do best: push code.

How can I get involved now?

From May 8 – 30, 2013, nominate and vote for repos you’d like to see featured at on national level. June 1, let the hacking begin!

Individual Brigades can also participate by submitting repos they’d like to work on locally with their group during the campaign. Though these won’t be featured nationally, we want to recognize the work all Brigades are doing in their communities.

Why this campaign?

Summer is a great time to pitch in to make our communities better. Coding is one way to roll up our sleeves and help.

We created this campaign because we believe that as good, open source citizens, we need to build our infrastructure and take care of the repos important to our community.

We’re excited to see what happens when we collaborate as a national network. Imagine what we can code together.

How does National Day of Civic Hacking tie in?

The Great American Civic Hack will be punctuated by the National Day of Civic Hacking on June 1 – 2, 2013. During that weekend, we’ll join with 80+ other events across the country to highlight the power of civic hacking.

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.org.

Greg Hermann’s official title at the City of Carlsbad is Senior Management Analyst, but his City business card identifies him as “head nerd.” Here’s what he does, in his words:

I work in the City Manager’s Office and help support technology and innovation initiatives. I consider myself a municipal coder, combining a passion for technology with a deep appreciation for the complex systems that make communities work. While I don’t know rails (yet), I am pretty familiar the programming language for cities, muni code. My hope is that this allows me to better connect the dots between technology, government, and communities.

Last fall we stood up our first open source app (Adopta) with the help of our local Brigade captain. We also have a number of projects in the pipeline including an open data portal, visualization tools for budget data, and an intrapreneurship program (Carlsbad Labs).

What civic innovation opportunity most excites you right now?

Similar to the data mashups the travel site Hipmunk uses as a new way to sort through flight and hotel options, I’m curious about how we can put a lot of data together to create new metrics for communities. Neighborhodness might be a mashup of crime data, proximity to a park or community garden, presence of a local social network like Nextdoor, etc.

I’ve also recently been bugging CFA staff about trying a reverse fellowship – sending someone from local gov into a tech company.

What do your (non-government) friends think you do?

Oh, probably some version of Amy Poehler’s character on Parks & Rec. But, in fairness it can be difficult to explain what my role is. The best description I’ve ever heard about the work of cities came from my City Manager in Palo Alto, Jim Keene. He said the real role of cities is “to establish and maintain agreements on how we are going to live together.” To that extent I think public service is a little like being the contract administrator for civil society which led me to my current Twitter bio “keeper of the social contract.”

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.