We have been really energized by our conversations and collaborations with these groups and others, and there is great interest in figuring out how to build upon those interactions. As our focus in the U.S. has shifted to include network-building among civic technologists and city change-agents, we began to think about how we could build a network that included international partners as well.

I’m happy to say that over the past few months we’ve made an institutional commitment to building and facilitating that international network. Many people have asked me why, given how young Code for America is, we would commit to such a large undertaking. Here’s why:

First, the global open government movement is at an inflection point. Open government advocates are moving from an era of opening datasets to building actionable tools on top of that data, and more and more government officials are recognizing the importance of transparent and actionable data to the vibrancy of their communities and the well-being of their citizens. The Open Government Partnership, a coalition of countries committed to a set of standard practices around transparency and open government, is one high-profile signal of how open many officials around the world are to government innovation.  Now is the right time to be working to connect governments and civic technologists at the local level, around the globe. By collaborating with governments to build capabilities and show what is possible, we hope we can complement the great work of those groups advocating for open government and open data policies.

Second, as programs similar to Code for America begin to take root in other countries, we think all of our work will be better if we’re connected. Our programs will be more efficient, we’ll be able to leverage each other’s tools and resources, we can share best practices and lessons learned, and we can create standards that will make it easier to sustain open government policy and programs. We have an opportunity to see how others around the world would do it, and learn from their models. It will make all of our programs stronger.

So, with that in mind, we’re setting out to grow a network of like-minded organizations around the world who are implementing similar programs where they live. All of us will share some key values but beyond those the programs will be structured according to what works best in the local context. In true lean startup fashion, we’re not waiting to get to work. We have three pilot partners who are going to be starting their programs in the coming weeks. All of them will be running fellowship programs, matching professional technologists with government agencies.

Code for Mexico City (CodigoDF): Led by Gabriella Gomez-Mont and her team, Code for Mexico City will be run from the city government’s Laboratorio para la Ciudad (LabPLC), a new initiative by Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera. The LabPLC is Mexico City’s office of civic innovation and urban creativity and will, much like the Departments of New Urban Mechanics in Boston and Philadelphia, work across the city’s departments to help develop innovative solutions to the city’s most entrenched problems, as well as to foster a community of innovators within the city government. The first class of CodigoDF fellows will be working with five departments: transport, health, tourism, ecology, and economic development.

CodigoDF is unique in that it only focuses on one city, but with a metropolitan area of 21 million people—larger than most of the world’s countries. The innovations created here have the potential to scale regionally, if not globally, and we’re excited about the prospect of plugging Mexico City’s leaders into our larger network of city officials.

Code for Germany (Code for All DE): Led by Julia Kloiber and Daniel Dietrich, Code for Germany will be a program of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s German chapter. The Open Knowledge Foundation is an open data and open government pioneer, and Julia and Daniel will bring a deep well of expertise on these issues to creating richer engagements with government. They have worked extensively to help governments to open up data and help others to make use of this data. As a think and do tank they run a series of well established programs within the field of civic apps and data and advise the government on open data policy issues.

Empowering others to engage with the government and building a community of best practice is always at the core of their activities in Germany. Code for Germany will build on the experience of the fellowship program Stadt, Land<Code> launched in 2012, creating a community of civic technologists building civic innovations. Much like Code for America, Code for Germany will operate at the national level and deploy fellows to multiple cities in the country.

Code for the Caribbean (@CodefortheCarib): Led by Matthew McNaughton, Code for the Caribbean is a regional program supporting the island governments of the Caribbean around shared goals for economic development through technology and innovation. Matthew is the founder of the SlashRoots Foundation, a Caribbean civic technology non-profit and developer community that organizes an annual open data conference and code sprint called Developing the Caribbean in collaboration with the Caribbean Open Institute and a number of regional partners. This year, Developing the Caribbean had simultaneous events in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba, Suriname, Guyana, and the Dominican Republic.

Code for the Caribbean will begin with a pilot program in Jamaica, in collaboration with the Rural Area Development Authority (RADA), an agency of the Ministry of Agriculture, to address the problem of praedial larceny (the theft of livestock and crops from the field). The pilot is being led by the Mona School of Business & Management, SlashRoots, and the Caribbean Open Institute. The mission of the latter is to promote open data as a means toward greater economic development in the region. More on the pilot can be found here and here. To achieve this end, Code of the Caribbean is launching a Fellowship Program, where four chosen fellows will be embedded within RADA for a six-month period and—in addition to assessing additional needs of the organization—will create at least one application designed to combat praedial larceny. CftC intends to expand to other islands in future cycles.

The four of us will learn together, testing and iterating as we go, to establish a longer-term plan for adding new partners and creating a larger community. Along the way we’ll be publishing resources, as well as our thoughts about how the program is going. And we’ll be supported by an amazingly talented group of advisors who will help guide our vision.

There are likely many more of you out there doing this work and we’d love to hear from you. In the short term, we are focused on making sure these pilots are successful so we can sustainably grow the network. But we are actively working on ways to start building relationships with groups in as many countries as possible. If you’re interested in finding out more, send a note to international [@] codeforamerica.org and keep checking this space for updates.

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.

To say that Chicago does a lot of civic hacking events would be an understatement. For the last year, civic minded web developers, data scientists, designers, and community organizers have gathered at 1871 each Tuesday for the Chicago OpenGov Hack Night. Recently, the Chicago Police Department hosted a hackathon at Google Chicago in order to find creative ways to use the new ClearPath API. Part of the reason for all this activity is that the City of Chicago has released a ton of open data that helps fuel civic app development: 931 datasets and counting.

So, for National Day of Civic Hacking it only made sense to have multiple events. These events were helped to be put together by a variety of partners including the Smart Chicago Collaborative, Institute of Justice & Journalism, Adler Planetarium, Cibola, The MacArthur Foundation, the Chicago Architecture Foundation, Minkva Challenge, Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring, Hive Chicago, Free Spirit Media, Knight Lab, Open City Apps, and the City of Chicago.

While hackathons are great for organizing around civic issues and getting together to solve problems using technology, they aren’t the best method for actually building civic apps. That’s why we’re encouraging participants to continue the ideas that start at National Day of Civic Hacking by attending the weekly OpenGov Hack Nights. (You can see a list of hack nights in your area by visiting the Code for America Brigade website.)

To find out more about the National Day of Civic Hacking in Chicago, you can check out details of each event here. To find out more about National Day of Civic Hacking events in your area, visit the Hack for Change website.

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.

On Saturday, June 1, New York City will hold its first CityCamp and NYC BigApps Demo Night! This is one day to celebrate and explore NYC’s civic technology community — hack, polish, and learn!

As part of National Day of Civic Hacking and NYC BigApps, New Yorkers will have a unique opportunity to dive into NYC BigApps projects and hear from the City’s civic technology leaders. NYC BigApps participants will have a unique opportunity to receive advice from NYC top subject matter experts. Since CityCamp is an unconference, participants will determine some of the sessions and help with facilitation.

CityCamp:
From 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., will we unconference, hack, beta test civic apps, and learn from each other. If you are working on a BigApp, this is your chance to get intimate feedback from subject matter experts and members of the public. If you are a member of the public, this your chance to see NYC BigApps teams working on their apps, to hear from thought leaders, and learn from each other.

NYC BigApps Demo Night:
Before teams submit their final apps, watch them compete for cash, a chance to visit the White House, and MORE!

NYC BigApp projects that wish to demo must submit a fully functional demo to by 4:00 p.m. on June 1, 2013. Arrive early so you can meet this deadline. Email help [@] nycbigapps.com. if you have questions about demoing. Keep in mind that those selected to demo have no advantage or disadvantage in the overall NYC BigApps competition.

Registration is open and the event is free for participants. If you are interested in volunteering, register here.

Date:
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Morning Events: 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Evening Events: 4:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Location: 
New York Law School
185 W Broadway, New York, N.Y.

About NYC BigApps:
NYC BigApps is the America’s premier municipal civic apps competition. Created in 2009 by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, NYC BigApps has helped create nearly 240 applications and opened up more than 750 City datasets to developers.

NYC BigApps CityCamp Partners:
New York Law School
Code for America Brigade

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.

As we’ve seen in the past few years, there’s tremendous capacity in the community that city governments can tap into—they just have to come together. That’s what our Brigades do every day. They’ll be hosting more than 30 of the events on the National Day of Civic Hacking.

The organizing groups already have a growing list of challenges, which cities can take advantage of, and I thought I’d offer a couple of suggestions for opportunities we’ve identified at the local level.

If you read the list, you’ll sense a theme: I’m asking you to build atop or support existing platforms and institutions. That’s my bias. I believe that as a community, we are stronger when we are working together, building block by block towards a shared infrastructure for innovation. (And let’s be fair, when you leverage existing tools or platforms, you’re saving yourself some time…)

So here are some options:

Technical

Leverage a Civic Data Standard. Data standards are protocols by which information from different places becomes interoperable. They are basically Excel templates—but powerful ones. Once a city adopts an open data standard, not only can pre-built, civic apps be deployed, but national platforms can ingest that data, making it easily accessible.

• Integrate LIVES standard: Earlier this year, with the City of San Francisco, we built a data standard for restaurant inspections (LIVES); now if a city takes its food inspection (which most cities already make publicly available online) and aligns it with the standard, companies such as Yelp can display it in their restaurant profiles. So the data goes from being hard to find, to right where you want it.

• Build atop Open311 or General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS)

Stand up a civic app. Not to beat a dead horse, but don’t forget that there’s a library of great opensource civic applications, which you can deploy for your city. Here are some great examples to get you started: LocalWiki, Adopta, EarlyOakland.

Non-technical

Have a conversation. NDoCH is a great opportunity to talk, share ideas, and gain interest in the open government movement.

• If you’re a civic hacker or community member who finds yourself talking to a public servant over lunch, be an evangelist. Discuss the importance of open civic data and data standards, share what you know about open source civic applications and civic tech start-ups, and ask about the day-to-day issues they face in their work (maybe you can stand up an app that would help).

• If you’re a government official who is participating in a local event, collaborate with civic developers by sharing honestly with them the problems you are trying to solve and the tools you need. And ask the people you meet about what kind of civic data they would most like to have access to.

Document/Share Successes. After the event is over, write a blog post, Tumbl, Storify, or email update and share it with the event organizers and brigade@codeforamerica.org. Capture the conversations you had, tell us about the tool you built and why you built it, share plans made to open new data or build on data standards. And share what went wrong and what you learned, so others can replicate your successes.

More than anything else, I’ll just ask this one thing for the National Day of Civic Hacking—let it live beyond the day. Whether it’s continuing to build an app you start that weekend, following up on a conversation, joining a hack night, or participating in a civic coding activity like the Great American Civic Hack, carry the energy of the weekend on.

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.

Through this campaign for civic coding we want Brigades and their members to strengthen and show off their open source skills. By strengthening our skills we will make better open source, civic software for ourselves and each other. By showing off our skills we will let others know what civic coding is and what impact it has.

So, what does it mean to strengthen open source skills? Basically it means set a goal and commit to it. Do you have 10 issues that have been nagging? Close them. Have you always been meaning to code that “EZ Button” installer for your software? Code it. Are the best pieces of your project fragmented across forks? Merge or prune. Have you been meaning to update to latest versions? Get it done.

And how do we show this off? Tell us what you’ll be working on this summer by nominating your favorite open source repo from GitHub or Drupal.org. It could be a big project used all over or it could be something your local Brigade is hacking together. We’ll monitor and report on everyone’s activities and achievements. We’re handing out some prizes to say thanks and have a little competitive fun. Who knows, your participation in could even land you a trip to The White House Champions of Change event in July honoring civic hackers for their contributions.

Civic coding is something that Brigade members and other civic hackers do every day for the public good. We think it’s appropriate respect and honor the work. That’s what National Day of Civic Hacking and The Great American Hack are all about.

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.

The event is being presented by OpenOakland, a Code for America Brigade that was set up in this past year by Steve Spiker and Eddie Tejeda to sustain some of the work that was being done at Oakland’s various hackathons. OpenOakland sought out volunteer coders, designers, data geeks, journalists, and city staff that were interested in collaboratively working together to develop solutions to civic challenges. The group, which I am an active member of, meets weekly in Oakland City Hall. Every week, 15-30 people gather together and work on technology related projects that address a wide range of topics as diverse as crime, sustainability, and early childhood education. In less than a year, the group has stood up several applications including: OpenBudgetOakland, a tool to visually explore the City’s budget; OaklandBeats, a police beat finder; and Adopt a Drain, a tool to help residents adopt and maintain storm drains.

While these apps help with access to public information and promoting volunteerism, the biggest success has not been in the technology, but in the positive effects that the efforts have had on local government and on the community.

Civic hacking develops smarter governance

In addition to the Tuesday night meetings, OpenOakland has worked to develop events that invite City staff to engage in conversations about how technology can positively change the relationships between the City and the community. At CityCamp Oakland, sessions on transparency and open data, civic engagement, youth, and bridging the digital divide had significant interest. By talking openly with City staff, residents gained a level of trust for the work that is being done by local government, and by bridging that relationship, City staff gained valuable insight into the needs of our community.

Civic hacking helps open government

Over the past year, the City of Oakland has made significant advances to increase civic engagement and have a more open government. We have launched EngageOakland.com, an online civic engagement platform; pushed numerous datasets to our new Open Data platform; and actively pursued a Code for America Fellowship. In addition, we have worked on redesigning processes and service delivery that will make our City more open, modern, and efficient.

Much of the success of these open government initiatives has been due to the support of the civic hacking community.

Developing an engaged civic hacking community

Civic hackers can be anyone willing to think up creative, often tech approaches geared towards solving civic problems. Currently we have people engaged in looking at issues around contracting with the City, applying for permits, and accessing public information. With exposure to the complexities of government, civic hackers develop a better understanding of the limitations and possibilities. Even if an app never gets launched, it is not a failed cause. With people actively participating in the development of these applications, we’re fostering a more engaged community, eager to contribute to their City and help solve problems as they arise.

Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.

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.